This blog will not delve into the ins and outs of the different ways of how to manage alarm fatigue as in accordance with the JCAHO NPSG announcement on June 25, 2013.
Much has been written about this and the awareness is front and center. It (JCAHO NPSG) is broken into the respective two phases, that is Phase I (beginning in June 2014) and Phase II, (beginning in January 2016). Education of those in the organization about alarm system management will also be required in January 2016.
Several patient monitoring companies are addressing this by collecting alarm information from patients from different physiological parameters and thus being able to create custom profiles for different types of patient populations. I commend these efforts as a great start and from what I have seen this has had excellent results…a significant reduction of false alarms. Actually it is creating the right predictive tools to understand perhaps what is going on before you have an alarm. That is what is ideal.
We envision that every medical device will have Bluetooth LE embedded in it. Follows the same process as WIFI over 14 years ago, but for different reasons.
What if you can have all your different patient profiles for all different type of unit settings loaded in a secure pass word smart card vault? Then when setting up your patient for monitoring this profile could be easily and by authentication to the user be loaded into the medical device. Would potentially decrease errors, improve productivity and work flow as well as create an audit trail.
