Medical Distress Alert System Using Rfid Technology Essay

Call lights are the lifeline to receiving care throughout inpatient hospital settings. Technology is built within the call light tool for patients to communicate from the press of a button on the remote. Nurses and certified nursing assistants answer the call light from a phone device that is sent from the call light. Locally, Bellin Hospital in Green Bay, call light is designed with a red cross to send a call to the patient’s certified nursing assistant. If the certified nursing assistant doesn’t acknowledge the call then the nurse receives the call. Additionally, Bellin’s call light system has tv options, nurse request and toilet request. Call lights signal through noise, outside patient room light, nursing stations and nursing staff.

Significance: Because nursing is the largest health care profession and nurses provide most of the patient care, and as an acute nurse, I can relate to how unsafe nurse staffing/low nurse-to-patient ratios can have negative impact on patient satisfaction and outcome, can lead to medical and/or medication errors and nurse burnout. It can also bring about anxiety and frustration, which can also clouds the nurses’ critical thinking. Most patients might not know the work load on a particular nurse and can assume that her nurse is just not efficient. Doctors also can become very impatient with their nurses because orders are not being followed through that can delay treatments to their patients. There is also delays in attending to call lights resulting in very unhappy patients who needed help.

In Cvach’s (2012) article, an integrated review synthesized research and non-research findings of seventy-two articles, published between 1/1/2000 and 10/1/2011. The author used the John Hopkins Nursing Evidence Based-Practice model to measure and evaluate the articles for this review. The data collected were categorized into 5 main themes: excessive alarms and the effects on nurses, nurse's response to alarms, alarm sounds and audibility, technology to reduce false alarms, and alarm notification system (Cvach, 2012). The purpose of this integrated review was to find out if the volume of noise (false alarms vs true alarms) disrupts the nurse’s response and perception to physiologic clinical alarms. The 3 main recommendations provided by the researcher were to implement the use of smart technology, generate change within the hospital's environment and protocols, and use of precautionary measures by healthcare staff in order to reduce monitor alarm fatigue.

    The modern day emergency room is a department that is constantly busy. In the hustle of caring for patients, there are some details of the patient’s care that can be overlooked in a standard phone report to the accepting nurse. With this in mind, a change is needed so that there is an optimum patient outcome for each and every one of the people that walk through the doors of the emergency room and get admitted.

Clinical alarm systems in acute and critical care health care settings are an assistive way to maintain communication between the client and the nurse. Awareness and comprehension of health devices is crucial to provide nurses with appropriate strategies for critical or non critical interventions that can lead to sentinel events. The ECRI, a nonprofit institute, has identified alarm hazards as the “Top Ten Health Technology Hazards” for 2014. (cite) In 2013 The Joint Commission published a Sentinel Event Alert proposing a National Safety Goal to focus on alarm safety (cite). This topic is pertinent information to be recognized and set as an achievable action in improving patient safety.

Urgent Care System: In this suggestion, urgent care should be acting as a more effective system for non-emergency medical treatment. As being observed in emergency waiting room, especially at night, urgency statement for most of the cases can be measured between emergency and postpone-available treatments. In this way, urgent care is the department needed for treating patient, in which it is available to distribute and triage patients to different departments and directs them to receive testing lab immediately. By implementing this strategy, patients can be treated at the first time so that preventable death can be eased with urgent assistant provided and it makes work more efficient compares to be line up in family doctor’s office and going over the whole testing process for

The name of their electronic monitoring system is the VitalPAC. The VitalPAC allows nurses to plug in information about their patients easily onto an iPAD. This accurately records what time treatment was giving and what dosages were given. This method helps staff members do their jobs but also holds them accountable for their actions. With electronic monitoring a timestamp records exactly when a patient received treatment. Electronic monitoring records who the caregiver was taking care of the patient and where the treatment took place. The benefits of electronic monitoring are immeasurable. “We welcome technology that improves the care we can offer, but it will never replace the face-to-face contact that our patients value” (Downey, 2015). Oswestry Orthopaedic Hospital is the first orthopaedic provider to adopt the electronic system. The system replaces all paper charts and makes everything paperless which is beneficial to the facility keeping everything organized and taking up less space. Electronic file saving also reduces the loss of records in case of a fire or other natural disaster. VitalPAC is very helpful to nurses producing an observation chart automatically and calculating an early warning score. Calculating a warning score can be very time consuming if done manually. “Recording vital signs data regularly and accurately is central

Cerner integrates patient information throughout all of the departments within a hospital setting. This program also has the ability to expand into other health care facilities within a community, such as long term care, hospice, and home health (Cerner, 2015). Cerner offers community hospitals solutions in their “Software as a Service” model. Cerner will host the software program, provide upgrades, and monitor performance to ensure stability. This will allow community hospitals to have a predictable cost for the software (Cerner, 2015). Another advantage of this system is the “Smart Room”. Wireless devices such as infusion pumps, and vital sign monitoring devices can access the system. This allows for instant documentation of this information into a patient chart and will alert if abnormalities are noted. Bar code scanners and carts are available as well. These items improve patient safety (Cerner, 2015). Cerner is capable of CPOE, electronic prescription transmitting, and has the ability to capture data and immunization statuses to meet reporting regulations.

This paper examines this culture of alarm fatigue among nurses in clinical care areas and the resulting potential for harm among the patient population. Although alarm fatigue may happen in any clinical area with frequent or repetitive alarms, this paper focuses on the phenomenon in critical care. The broad scope of this issue coupled with the high risk of patient harm demands insight and action from the nursing profession. By discussion and review of contributing factors such as repetitive alarms, noise level, lack of individualized settings, poorly configured devices, and desensitization of nurses, healthcare providers can strategize methods to prevent patient harm resulting from alarm fatigue. These measures also promote efficiency

Visit your local Emergency Room on any given day and you are likely to witness a sort of controlled chaos: nurses, doctors, transporters, patient care technicians, and other ancillary staff members all darting about, attempting to meet the needs of increasingly sick patients in oft-overwhelmed and overpopulated hospitals. All around, various alarms sound. IV pumps signal fluid bags about to run dry. Vital sign monitors ping at differing volumes and intensities, in an electronic demand for staff to mind the out-of-normal-range

Alarm fatigue was brought into the spotlight in recent years because of adverse patient outcomes. These sentinel events triggered the Joint Commission to make alarm safety a goal in 2014, and mandating policies and procedures to be in place by 2016 for better monitoring and observance of alarms. I decided to highlight this topic since a large part of a critical care nurse’s daily routine is silencing alarms for monitors, pumps, ventilators, beds and call lights. In my personal experience inappropriately set parameters for monitors can lead to sensory overload for staff, patients and families leading to a less than desirable work and care environment. In most cases false alarms can be minimized with simple interventions, alerting staff to real situations requiring intervention.

False alarm is sometimes driven to unsafe actions. The nurses who must repeatedly respond to every single alarm which are mostly false leading to alarm fatigue and ignore to respond true critical alarm (Solet,& Barach,2012). The excessive alarms in patient care are distracting and interfering with the ability of the nurse to perform patient care tasks (Solet,& Barach,2012). When there are excessive of false alarms the clinicians adapt to response less or react with less urgency (Solet,& Barach,2012). Ignoring alarm can cause serious harm or death to the patients (Cvach, 2012).

According to the Joint Commission 2014, clinical alarm systems are designed to alert staff for any potential patient problems, but they can jeopardize the patient safety, if they are not managed and responded properly. Nurses are known for their ability of multitasking, but everything has a limit. Due to multiple interruptions and distractions, including alarms systems, nurses develop alarm fatigue and try to tune them out and ignore them. "Alarm fatigue occurs when clinicians become desensitized and nonreactive to the sensory overload created by an overwhelming number of alarms, many of which are nuisance or non-actionable alarms” (NACNS 2013-2014).

In 2010, the medical critical care unit at the York Street campus of Yale–New Haven expanded into two 28-bed units housed on two floors, each encompassing 33,000 square feet. The increase in geography posed new challenges for clinical staff with regard to alarm management. Crisis monitor alarms were programmed to populate the bedside physiologic monitoring screens in zoned clinical areas. This allowed clinicians to view the alarm condition and respond appropriately to area alarms.

Another technology the hospital uses is the pager. The hospital provides pager to many staff like doctors, technicians, etc. When it comes to the nursing staff, one has to use the land phone. If someone needs to talk to the primary nurse of a patient, or when a nurse needs to contact another nurse or a technician right away, they have to use the landline. The problem identified with this is, if the desired person does not pick up the phone or is busy, the caller needs to leave a message which can get ignored or forgotten to convey. In the case of an emergency, the use of a land phone is