An effective alarm system is crucial for long-term care facilities, but with it must also come effective alarm management, which is lacking all too often in facilities, researchers have found.
Investigators at Johns Hopkins University have studied how to reduce alarm fatigue among caregivers. The study involved using software to filter “false positives” and flag patients who abused the alarm system.
“Excessive monitor alarms may have the undesired effect of staff ignoring, silencing, or delaying a response,” the researchers note in a report. “Outlier patients, or those patients who are responsible for generating the most monitor alarms, contribute to excessive monitor alarms.”
For the study, caregivers received a notification on their phone showing them when a patient used the alarm system four times more than the weekly average.
The tools effectively allowed nurses to change alarm thresholds and decrease alarm duration through the four telemetry units involved in the research.
Almost three-quarters of nurses face alarm fatigue at some point during their work, and as little as 10% of alarms — some caregivers respond to hundreds per patient per day — are “clinically significant,” studies show.
The Johns Hopkins study was published recently in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology, which is run by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.
Interestingly, although the alarm duration was shortened, the frequency of alarms increased, although the researchers weren’t sure why. One possibility is that the study was conducted during the pandemic, an AAMI spokesman said.
Some tools such as real-time surveillance, combined with best practices and prioritization protocols, can help significantly reduce alarm use (and overuse), experts have written for McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
In addition, at least one new alarm system, available through Lifeline Senior Living, uses Alexa and is designed so that caregivers can assess the urgency of incoming requests and prioritize.
