Refining the Performance of Medical Device Alarms

Numerous aspects of patient care compete for providers' attention and can reduce their vigilance in monitoring medical devices. Alarms can alert providers to urgent situations that might have been missed due to other distractions and have become a necessary part of patient monitoring. In a study looking at critical incidents within a neonatal intensive care unit, 10% were detected through alarms.

However, fundamental flaws in the design of current alarm systems likely decrease their impact.21 There are reports documenting some alarm failings in the medical literature,22 but few data address interventions to improve alarm system effectiveness. For an alarm to be effective it requires that a medical problem trigger the alarm, that personnel identify the source and reason for the alarm, and that the medical problem be corrected prior to patient injury. This section reviews 2 aspects of alarm safety: (1) the use of HFE principles in the redesign of medical alarms to improve identification of the source and reason for alarm, and (2) practices in both device design and programming that may improve safety by decreasing false positive alarms.

From www.ahrq.gov