The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation highlighted research done by assistant professor Jessica Zègre-Hemsey, PhD, RN, and her colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) on their blog, Human Capital.
The study, led by Dr. Barbara J. Drew, PhD, RN, from UCSF, examined the problem of “alarm fatigue” in which health care providers miss or ignore alarms because too many of them are false or non-actionable. The researchers found more than 2.5 million alarms were triggered on bedside monitors in a single month– the first figure derived from a real-world hospital setting. Additionally, when they analyzed a subset of 12,671 arrhythmia alarms, they found 88.8 percent were false positives.
In the paper, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers suggested potential solutions for alarm fatigue, including monitors that could be configured to individual patients and a “gold standard” database of annotated alarm readouts.
For the full story, see the Human Captital blog.