Title

Analysis: Protocol for a New Method to Measure Physiologic Monitor Alarm Responsiveness.

Year of Publication

2020

Number of Pages

389-396

Date Published

2020 Nov 01

ISSN Number

0899-8205

Abstract

<p>Evaluating the clinical impacts of healthcare alarm management systems plays a critical role in assessing newly implemented monitoring technology, exposing latent threats to patient safety, and identifying opportunities for system improvement. We describe a novel, accurate, rapidly implementable, and readily reproducible in situ simulation approach to measure alarm response times and rates without the challenges and expense of video analysis. An interprofessional team consisting of biomedical engineers, human factors engineers, information technology specialists, nurses, physicians, facilitators from the hospital's simulation center, clinical informaticians, and hospital administrative leadership worked with three units at a pediatric hospital to design and conduct the simulations. Existing hospital technology was used to transmit a simulated, unambiguously critical alarm that appeared to originate from an actual patient to the nurse's mobile device, and discreet observers measured responses. Simulation observational data can be used to design and evaluate quality improvement efforts to address alarm responsiveness and to benchmark performance of different alarm communication systems.</p>

DOI

10.2345/0899-8205-54.6.389

Alternate Title

Biomed Instrum Technol

PMID

33339028

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