Key result
Individualizing alarm settings for each patient's condition is the easiest and most direct method for reducing false clinical alarms and hospital noise.
Why the study?
What are the best practices for reducing false clinical alarms from medical devices in hospital environments?
What are the best practices for reducing false clinical alarms from medical devices in hospital environments?
Individualizing alarm settings for each patient is the most direct method to reduce false clinical alarms and improve the hospital environment.
May support customizing alarms to reduce noise; hypothesis-generating pending controlled outcome trials.
Increasing noise in hospital environments, especially in intensive care units (ICUs) and operating rooms (ORs), has created a formidable challenge for both patients and hospital staff. A major contributing factor for the increasing noise levels in these environments is the number of false alarms generated by medical devices. This study focuses on discovering best practices for reducing the number of false clinical alarms in order to increase patient safety and provide a quiet environment for both work and healing. The researchers reviewed Pub Med, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar sources to obtain original journal research and review articles published through January 2012. This review includes 27 critically important journal articles that address different aspects of medical device alarms management, including the audibility, identification, urgency mapping, and response time of nursing staff and different solutions to such problems. With current technology, the easiest and most direct method for reducing false alarms is to individualize alarm settings for each patient's condition. Promoting an institutional culture change that emphasizes the importance of individualization of alarms is therefore an important goal. Future research should also focus on the development of smart alarms.
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Konkani et al. (2012) conducted a review in Hospital noise and medical device alarm management (n=27). Medical device alarm management was evaluated on Best practices for reducing false clinical alarms. Individualizing alarm settings for each patient's condition is the easiest and most direct method for reducing false clinical alarms and hospital noise.
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