HTSI Paper Examines Hospital’s Approach
To Alarm Challenges

Establishing a multidisciplinary telemetry task force to guide decisions; instituting a technician program for round-the-clock coverage of monitored patients and devices; and developing an in-house educational program for nurses are just three of the tips offered in a new white paper released by the AAMI Foundation’s Healthcare Technology Safety Institute (HTSI) on solving alarm system challenges.

The paper, “Plan, Do, Check, Act: Using Action Research to Manage Alarm Systems, Signals, and Responses,” details steps taken by the emergency department staff at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston after discovering inconsistent cardiac telemetry alarm system management.  The center’s solution involved a “Lean” approach, which has its roots in manufacturing, as a guide to achieving better systems outcomes. The steps it took might help other medical centers ensure patient safety.

Medical device alarms are an important part of patient care. However, if caregivers ignore the alarm signals, the potential for poor patient outcomes increases. At Beth Israel Deaconess, between 40% and 50% of patients in general medical and surgery units were monitored on cardiac telemetry. During one 24-hour period, a multidisciplinary team observed 1,200 cardiac auditory alarm signals from 32 monitors on one cardiac unit alone. The team recognized that the sheer number of alarm signals, coupled with inconsistent criteria as to who was put on cardiac telemetry monitoring, posed a challenge to patient safety.

The paper looks at what steps—both in the short and long term—Beth Israel Deaconess took, including going “Lean” to allow front-line workers to identify problems. The staff has already seen positive results: a 30% decrease in alarm signals and much faster response times to critical alarm signals.

The paper is part of HTSI’s Safety Innovations series, which offers insights into how leading healthcare organizations have tackled technology-related safety issues. HTSI’s goal is to advance patient safety, and its first initiatives focus on infusion systems, clinical alarms, the reprocessing of reusable medical devices, and the interoperability of healthcare technologies.

“We encourage the widespread distribution of this and all of the papers in our Safety Innovations series,” says Leah Lough, executive director of the AAMI Foundation. “We believe that they will help clinicians, engineers, manufacturers, and others throughout the healthcare community improve the use and design of healthcare technology.”

To read the alarm systems paper, please click here (PDF).

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.