Physiologic Monitor Alarm Rates at 5 Children's Hospitals

Abstract

Alarm fatigue has been linked to patient morbidity and mortality in hospitals due to delayed or absent responses to monitor alarms. We sought to describe alarm rates at 5 freestanding children's hospitals during a single day and the types of alarms and proportions of patients monitored by using a point-prevalence, cross-sectional study design. We collected audible alarms on all inpatient units and calculated overall alarm rates and rates by alarm type per monitored patient per day. We found a total of 147,213 alarms during the study period, with 3-fold variation in alarm rates across hospitals among similar unit types. Across hospitals, onequarter of monitored beds were responsible for 71%, 61%, and 63% of alarms in medical-surgical, neonatal intensive care, and pediatric intensive care units, respectively. Future work focused on addressing nonactionable alarms in patients with the highest alarm counts may decrease alarm rates.