Alarm Fatigue: Using Alarm Data from a Patient Data Monitoring System on an Intensive Care Unit to Improve the Alarm Management

Abstract

Excessive numbers of clinical alarms reduce the awareness of caregivers. Frequent alarms, many of which are non-actionable, can lead to cognitive overload, stress, and desensitization to alarms, called "Alarm Fatigue", which can severely impact patient safety. Due to the multifactorial nature of excessive alarming quantitative data about many facets of alarm generation and management are required in order to tackle the problem efficiently and effectively. Since there is no system available which would provide said data, we set out to develop one in the form of a data warehouse based on a thorough understanding of clinicians' needs. The developed system answers the users' needs in terms of readily providing them information on a daily basis, but also serves as a data source for further research. Further work is needed to include alarm sources from outside the patient monitoring infrastructure.

Keywords: Alarm fatigue; Clinical Alarms; Clinical Alarms: organization and administration; Critical Care; Patient Safety; Sociotechnical System.