The Importance Of Patient Care Technology In Nursing

Alarm fatigue is a growing national problem within the health care industry that links medical technology as a serious hazard that poses a significant threat to patient safety within hospitals across the country. Alarm fatigue occurs when nurses encounter an overwhelming amount of alarms thus becoming desensitized to the firing alarms. Alarm desensitization is a multifaceted issue that is related to the number of alarming medical devices, a high false alarm rate, and the lack of alarm standardization in hospitals today (Cvach, 2012). Desensitization can lead to delayed response times, alarms silenced or turned off, or alarms adjusted to unsafe limits, which can create a dangerous situation for the patient. Alarm fatigue

Alarm fatigue in health care has grown to be an ever-growing concern in the health care arena, especially when looking at patient safety concerns. There must be an understanding of the problem before we can develop policies and effective strategies to counter this problem. The concept of alarm fatigue in health care will be evaluated utilizing the method developed by Walker and Avant (2010) that identifies and gives the significance of the attributes, antecedents, and end-consequences of alarm fatigue in health care. This will be developed based

Horkan, A. M. (2014). Exploring the Evidence Alarm Fatigue and Patient Safety. Nephrology Nursing Journal, 41(1), 83-85.

After exposure to repetitive and continuous alarms, nurses may become desensitized or overwhelmed with the number of alarms to respond to; this phenomenon is known as alarm fatigue (Graham & Cvach, 2010). Alarm fatigue can lead to dangerous practices such as turning off alarms, silencing alarms without evaluating or troubleshooting this issue, changing the alarm parameter to unreasonably broad settings, or complete disregard of the alarm (Ulrich, 2013). A significant contributing factor is the number of duplicate or false positive alarms nurses experience each shift, with studies showing that anywhere from 72-99 percent of alarms in the clinical setting are false or non-emergent (Graham & Cvach, 2010). Although alarm fatigue is commonly associated with critical care areas, it may occur in any patient care area with frequent or repetitive alarms (Gross, Dahl & Nielsen, 2011). In addition to causing a permanent harm or death, clinical alarms also contribute to noise levels in patient care areas, which in turn can cause insomnia or delirium.

Today’s healthcare is changing, and more hospitals are commencing to go paperless using computers for both medical records and charting. Computers are widely accepted, in personal and professional settings. It is an essential requirement for computer literacy. Numerous advances in technology during the past decade require that nurses not only be knowledgeable in nursing skills but also to become educated in computer technology. While electronic medical records (EMR’s) and charting can be an effective time management tool, some questions have been asked on how exactly this will impact the role and process of nursing, and the ultimate effects on patient safety and confidentiality. In order to

Eric, thank you for choosing such a significant topic for your paper. Alarm fatigue is a big problem in the healthcare field. Sentinel events related to alarm fatigue is something that is totally preventable. It’s interesting our body gets trained and used to hearing certain sounds after awhile where we don’t find these sounds even bothersome. Or we have developed a way to block out these sounds and still stay focus on our task at hand. If an alarm has the option, I like to change my patient’s alarm sound to a sound that I don’t hear often so that way it quickly catches my attention and my coworkers as well during my shift. I work in the ICU where I am closely monitoring my two patients and every bed has a bed alarm built inside the mattress.

I chose to write about this article on alarm fatigue. It talks about all the alarms that go off daily and how this can cause patient deaths because too many alarms means we just ignore them but sometimes they're real and that patient may die because we don't answer the alarm. I'm afraid this could happen on the unit where I work as a respiratory therapist. We're so busy with our new computerized charting that we don't have time for ventilator alarms that are always going off for no reason. The article says one research study found the percentage of false alarms ranges from 72% to 99.4%, which creates a "cry wolf" situation in which staff will respond to the alarm the percentage of time they deem it reliable. There are several suggestions for

The safety of the patient is very crucial when caring for patients and the community. The use of informatics would improve Patient safety, such as the use of medication barcode administration, (BCMA), and Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) are few informatics implementations that would help with patient safety in the healthcare system (Sewell, 2015) Cost is another driving force towards the use of informatics. With the cost of health at its highest, consumers and employers would use informatics to access the quality of care, compare prices and also compare providers. Medical errors in healthcare setting cost a hugged amount of money. “Electronically prescribed drugs are more legible, thus making it less likely that drugs would be wrongly administered to patients (Chih-Piing et al, 2016)”.The use of informatics will help reduce some of this error which would save the government, hospital, and consumers from extremely high

Alarm fatigue is recognized by The Joint Commission as a serious patient safety issue, with alarm mismanagement as being the root cause of alarm fatigue (The Joint Commission, 2013). Numerous regulatory and nursing organizations have published strategies to manage alarm fatigue, however evidence is lacking on the best methodology of educating nurses to alarm management. Put one or two lines of the problem the spurred this project. The aim of this study is to compare the effect of online education methodology versus traditional education methodology on the number of false and non-actionable alarm in a cardiac intensive care unit. Historically, the cardiac intensive care unit continues to have an excess number of false and non-actionable alarms despite previous attempts at raising awareness of alarm fatigue. Chapter three will describe

Hospitals are chaotic and can be difficult places to maintain safety if precautions aren’t taken. One-way that healthcare providers attempt to combat safety issues is by using different alarm systems to alert staff to issues in patient rooms. The many different alarms can be beneficial but can also cause a phenomenon that is referred to as alarm fatigue. Alarm fatigue is defined as a condition of sensory overload for staff members who are exposed to an excessive number of alarms (Blake, 2014). It is a national problem and the number one medical device technology hazard in 2012. The problem of alarm desensitization is multifaceted and could be attributed most heavily to high false alarm rates. Studies have indicated that the presence of false and/or clinically insignificant alarms ranges from 80-90% (Cvach, 2012). The constant alarms make it difficult for nurses to discern the difference between emergent and annoying alerts and can cause many to not respond as urgently as necessary.

Multiple sources cite false alarms in anywhere from 72-99% of all alarms (Ensslin, 2014; Meeks, 2014; Sendelbach & Funk, 2013). Clinical alarms are in place to enhance patient safety by alerting health care workers to deviations in predetermined normal status (Sendelbach and Funk, 2013), but with up to 1000 electronic alerts and alarms each shift, it is difficult to know which alarms to respond to (Duggan, 2016). In labor and delivery, two lives are depending on the nurse to know which alarms are important to respond to. In addition to the safety of the patient, persistent alarms affect the labor experience of the patient and family, contributing to increased stress and anxiety and decreasing the holistic experience (Meeks, 2014). Many times

The pharmacy-led barcode medication system (PBMS) requires staff to use a hand-held device to scan the barcode identifiers of care home residents to access patient files. A direct transfer of data between pharmacy and care home ensures that everyone is working to the latest instructions and that new medications, dose changes and stoppages are implemented immediately. The system provides visual confirmation of residents by photograph, followed by a number of checks. These automatically validate that: ■■ The correct medication is being administered to the right resident.

Although monitors and alarms are designed with the goal of improving patient monitoring and safety, the overwhelming number of alarms on any given inpatient unit may be doing the exact opposite. The result is that healthcare workers become overwhelmed with efforts to respond to multiple alarms. A report (Mitka, 2013) concluded that many facilities do not address alarm fatigue until something goes wrong. Healthcare workers also experience desensitization, resulting in missed alarms, and delayed response to critical alarms that place patients at

There has been a great deal of recent work surrounding the issue related to alarm fatigue in clinical settings. The Joint Commission (JACHO) has identified the importance to tackling the security of alarm systems. There have been many reported deaths related to the absence of attention to cardiac monitors (JACHO, 2013). A new patient safety goal for 2014 goal is to improve the safety of clinical alarms. Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) has listed the alarm hazards as the number one health technology hazard for 2014 (ECRI Institute, 2013). The ECRI endorses the implementation of interventions to minimize the number of insignificant alarms. The goal is to create an environment that promotes awareness to alarms that are actionable.

According to Cherry & Jacob (2014), “point-of-care is no longer nonessential but is paramount to deliver safe, efficient, high-quality patient care while accessing patient data and evidence-based guidelines” (p. 262). There are a wide variety of point-of-care (POC) devices which can be categorized as “transportable,” “portable,” or “handheld” (Louie, Tang, Shelby, & Kost, 2000, p. 402). Placing computers and handheld devices at the patient’s bedside allows nurses to enter pertinent data at the point of care. Documenting patient assessments, admission history, scanning in medications, etc. at the patient’s bedside saves time and “gives others more timely access to the data” (Yoder-Wise, 2011, p. 205). POC devices have improved the quality