Research on Patient Monitoring Alarms in ICU and NICU / 中国医疗器械杂志

OBJECTIVE@#The patient monitors were used to explore the alarm actuality in a ICU and NICU to investigate the awareness and reaction of medical staff to alarms.@*METHODS@#A series of surveys and interviews were taken to acquire clinicians' feelings and attitudes to monitoring alarms. The researchers were scheduled to track the alarms with annotations, and collect the alarm data of patient monitors using central monitoring system.@*RESULTS@#A total of 235 387 and 67 783 alarms occurred in ICU and NICU respectively. The average alarm rate was about 142 alarms/patient-day in ICU and 96 alarms/patient-day in NICU.@*CONCLUSIONS@#There remains alarm fatigue in ICU and NICU, the main reason is the large number of false alarms and clinically irrelevant alarms. In addition, patient monitor is still in the level of threshold alarms or combined alarms, the data integrity and intelligence level need to be improved in future.

Research of Methods to Reduce Alarm Fatigue of Monitoring System / 中国医疗器械杂志

OBJECTIVE@#In order to solve alarm fatigue, the algorithm optimization strategies were researched to reduce false and worthless alarms.@*METHODS@#A four-lead arrhythmia analysis algorithm, a multiparameter fusion analysis algorithm, an intelligent threshold reminder, a refractory period delay technique were proposed and tested with collected 28 679 alarms in multi-center study.@*RESULTS@#The sampling survey indicate that the 80.8% of arrhythmia false alarms were reduced by the four-lead analysis, the 55.9% of arrhythmia and pulse false alarms were reduced by the multi-parameter fusion analysis, the 28.0% and 29.8% of clinical worthless alarms were reduced by the intelligent threshold and refractory period delay techniques respectively. Finally, the total quantity of alarms decreased to 12 724.@*CONCLUSIONS@#To increase the dimensionality of parametric analysis and control the alarm limits and delay time are conducive to reduce alarm fatigue in intensive care units.