Utilizing Data and Alarm Champions to Enhance Alarm Management: A Pediatric Quality Improvement Initiative

Abstract

Background: Nuisance and false alarms distract clinicians from urgent alerts, raising patient safety risks.

Local problem: High alarm rates in a pediatric progressive care unit resulted in experiencing 180-250 alarms per day or 1 alarm every 3 to 4 minutes per clinician.

Methods: Through Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, environmental, policy, and technology changes were implemented to decrease the average alarms/day/bed and percentage of time in alarm.

Interventions: Alarm settings tailored to patient needs using features embedded within the patient monitoring system were implemented and monitored with the assistance of alarm champions.

Results: The average number of alarms/day/bed decreased from 177.69 to 96.94 over the course of 10 years, a 45.45% reduction. The percentage of time in alarm decreased from 7.52% to 2.83%, a 62.37% reduction.

Conclusions: Arming clinicians with technology to analyze real-time clinical data made alarms meaningful and actionable, decreasing false alarms without compromising patient safety.