The AAMI Foundation’s National Coalition for Alarm Management Safety has published a framework that it believes will provide a “consistent roadmap” for hospitals trying to reduce the number of nonactionable alarms.
The framework comes at a time when health care delivery organizations are under mounting pressure to improve their alarm management practices. For example, at the start of this year, The Joint Commission began requiring hospitals to establish and implement policies and procedures for managing clinical alarms.
The framework was published as an article in the May/June 2016 issue of BI&T (Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology), AAMI’s peer-reviewed and award-winning journal.
Alarm management-related issues, such as alarm fatigue, are consistently ranked as a top patient safety hazard by the ECRI Institute and other organizations. Alarm fatigue occurs when the cacophony of alarms from medical devices in a hospital unit —the majority of which are false or nonactionable — overwhelms clinicians to the point that they become desensitized, making it difficult to effectively respond to serious events.
“Alarm fatigue is a challenging sociotechnical problem, and hospitals often do not know where to start in addressing this issue,” said James Welch, CCE, executive vice president of product development at Sotera Wireless and lead author of the BI&T paper. “The goal of the framework is to provide a consistent and repeatable methodology by which each hospital can gauge where it is in addressing alarm fatigue and thereby move closer to becoming a high-reliability organization. By having a consistent process for alarm management, organizations will be better able to help one another achieve durable solutions.”
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