Physiologic Monitor Alarm Rates at 5 Children’s Hospitals
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, one-quarter 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.
© 2018 Society of Hospital Medicine
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Melinda Egan, Matt MacMurchy, and Shannon Stemler for their assistance with data collection.
Disclosure
Dr. Bonafide is supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K23HL116427. Dr. Brady is supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality under Award Number K08HS23827. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. There was no external funding obtained for this study. The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
