Improving Patient Safety and Reducing Alarm Fatigue

• Leah Baron, MD is chief of the department of Anesthesiology at Virtua Memorial Hospital;
• Maria Cvach, DNP, RN, FAAN is director of policy management and integration for Johns Hopkins Health System; and
• Marc Schlessinger, RRT, MBA, FACHE is senior associate at ECRI Institute's applied solutions group.

Recently, ECRI Institute issued its Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2018. One of ECRI's 2018 concerns is how missed alarms may result from inappropriately configured secondary notifications devices and systems. Marc Schlesinger provides useful tips from his experience in helping hospitals improve their alarm management.

To provide an example of how a hospital has been able to reduce alarm fatigue, Dr. Baron discusses Virtua Memorial Hospital's experience and the project that Virtua implemented. Virtua was able to do this by connecting capnography to middleware. This helped them to distinguish between actionable and non-actionable alarms, as well, create a notification system that escalated the alarms when they occurred. As Dr. Baron explains:

"We did create algorithms using parameters that we were obtaining from our capnostream monitors and algorithm that helped us, again, to identify the events that were clinically significant for our patients."                    

Maria Cvach provides insights and key learnings into how John Hopkins Health System was able to improve patient safety and reduce alarm fatigue.

To read a transcript of the podcast, please click here.

The podcast may be viewed on the PPAHS YouTube channel by clicking here.

About Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety

Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety is a non-profit 501(c)(3) whose mission is to promote safer clinical practices and standards for patients through collaboration among healthcare experts, professionals, scientific researchers, and others, to improve healthcare delivery. For more information, please go to www.ppahs.org.

SOURCE Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety

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