Technological Intervention to Improve Alarm Management in Acute Care Telemetry Units

Telemetry monitoring is intended to improve patient safety and reduce harm. However, excessive monitor alarms may have the undesired effect of staff ignoring, silencing, or delaying a response due to alarm fatigue. Outlier patients, or those patients who are responsible for generating the most monitor alarms, contribute to excessive monitor alarms. Daily alarm data reports at a large academic medical center indicated that one or two patient outliers generated the most alarms daily. A technological intervention aimed at reminding registered nurses (RNs) to adjust alarm thresholds for patients who triggered excessive alarms was implemented. The notification was sent to the assigned RN's mobile phone when a patient exceeded the unit's seven-day average of alarms per day by greater than 400%. A reduction in average alarm duration was observed across the four acute care telemetry units (P < 0.001), with an overall decrease of 8.07 seconds in the postintervention versus preintervention period. However, alarm frequency increased significantly (χ²₃ = 34.83, P < 0.001). Implementing a technological intervention to notify RNs to adjust alarm parameters may reduce alarm duration. Reducing alarm duration may improve RN telemetry management, alarm fatigue, and awareness. More research is needed to support this conclusion, as well as to determine the cause of the observed increase in alarm frequency.