Reducing Telemetry Alarm Fatigue

Abstract

In the recent years, the importance of reducing alarm fatigue in a clinical environment has taken precedence nationally. Alarm management is one of the Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals (2014) because sentinel events have directly been linked to the devices that are generating these alarms. At an acute care facility in Boston, a multi-disciplinary team was formed to conduct a pilot study on the state of telemetry alarms on a surgical floor. The goal of this pilot project was to facilitate an environment of care where nurses are tuned to cardiac telemetry alarms that are clinically significant so more efficient patient care may be provided for truly actionable events.

An evidence-based approach was taken utilizing alarms tracking software to capture all telemetry alarms during a twenty-five day time span. Likewise noise meters were placed near telemetry alarm speakers to track decibel levels during the aforementioned timeframe. Analysis of the data showed that clinically insignificant PVC alarms accounted for forty percent of all alarms in the unit within the time span, while also contributing to an average noise level of 57.84 dB in one of the selected areas. In response to the data, the interdisciplinary team approved to permanently default the settings for PAIR PVC, MULTIFORM PVC, and RUN PVC alarms to off. Alarm and noise data were subsequently tracked for an additional 25 days. The results showed a 54% decrease in the rate of alarms per bed per day, and an overall noise reduction of 1.5 dB.