Healthcare Technology Safety Institute to Host Free Webinars on Alarms

The AAMI Foundation’s Healthcare Technology Safety Institute (HTSI) will host two free webinars next month on alarm management.

The webinars are part of a broader effort by HTSI to curb alarm system problems. As the number of medical devices has multiplied, so has the number of alarms, creating a stressful environment for clinicians. Compounding the problem is the fact that some of the alarms are false. The end result is a condition called “alarm fatigue,” in which overwhelmed clinicians ignore critical alarms.

The first webinar is set for Dec. 3 from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. EST. It will focus on an approach developed by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA, to significantly reduce alarm signals throughout the hospital.

Members of a multidisciplinary team will discuss their step-by-step approach for analyzing possible failure modes, studying potential consequences, and educating clinicians about volume and visibility of alarm signals.

Featured speakers will be Tricia Bourie, RN, nurse manager of cardiology and chair of the Telemetry Task Force; Patricia E. Folcarelli, RN, director of patient safety; Jeffrey Smith, lead clinical engineer specialist; and Julius Jong Yang, MD.

To register for this webinar, click here.

The second webinar, scheduled for Dec. 17 from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. EST, will focus on how data can drive alarm system improvement efforts.

Two speakers from The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, will describe how a multidisciplinary team cut noise in the hospital and made clinicians more attentive to the alarm signals.

They will discuss how the hospital reduced alarm signals unit by unit by relying on data to establish baseline alarm priority levels and evaluating the effectiveness of improvement efforts.

The webinar speakers will be Maria Cvach, RN, assistant director of nursing, clinical standards; and Andrew Currie, director of clinical engineering.

To register for the webinar, click here. Cvach also wrote a free white paper on the project. To read it, click here (PDF).

For more information on HTSI’s work related to clinical alarms, click here.

AAMI, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, is a nonprofit organization founded in 1967. It is a diverse community of nearly 7,000 healthcare technology professionals united by one important mission—supporting the healthcare community in the development, management, and use of safe and effective medical technology.