ECG False Alarm and Alarm Fatigue

Alarm fatigue by false alarm

Alarm fatigue in healthcare refers to the desensitization that healthcare providers may experience due to the frequent and often false alarms from medical devices such as monitors, ventilators, and infusion pumps. This desensitization can lead to delayed response or missed alarms, which can compromise patient safety. Alarm fatigue is a significant concern in healthcare settings, and efforts are continuously made to address it through better alarm management strategies, improved technology, and staff education.

Alarm fatigue: a patient safety concern

Research has demonstrated that 72% to 99% of clinical alarms are false. The high number of false alarms has led to alarm fatigue. Alarm fatigue is sensory overload when clinicians are exposed to an excessive number of alarms, which can result in desensitization to alarms and missed alarms. Patient deaths have been attributed to alarm fatigue. Patient safety and regulatory agencies have focused on the issue of alarm fatigue, and it is a 2014 Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal. Quality improvement projects have demonstrated that strategies such as daily electrocardiogram electrode changes, proper skin preparation, education, and customization of alarm parameters have been able to decrease the number of false alarms. These and other strategies need to be tested in rigorous clinical trials to determine whether they reduce alarm burden without compromising patient safety.

Solutions for reducing ECG false alarm and alarm fatigue

Our development was conducted to solve and reduce the problem of "ECG false alarms and alarm fatigue" that may lead to medical accidents in hospitals such as ICU, CCU, and general wards. The most important role with Patient Monitoring System is "alarm function" that automatically analyzes patient signals and notifies medical personnel such as doctors and nurses when an abnormality is detected.

However, biological signals, especially electrocardiograms (ECG or EKG), are very small and delicate due to high skin impedance, which makes them susceptible by noise, which disrupts the waveform to be recognized as abnormal ECG and to trigger an alarm. When the alarm goes off, nurse rush to the patient and find out that it is a false alarm.

Therefore, so they become skeptical about the reliability of the alarm, resulting in so-called "wolf boy" problem. This has become an important issue to be solved. This development makes it possible to significantly suppress noise contamination during ECG monitoring and improves the reliability of alarms during patient monitoring.

Besides patient monitor, it is also benefit to the relative ECG application such as wireless telemetry ECG and portable Holter ECG. As long as the patients are able to move, it easily receives the noise from the various conditions and environments. Sometime may not cause immediately danger but it may influence the analysis of ECG waveform by doctor and his judgement may lead to medical error.

We believe that garbage in and garbage out as a universal rule. Nowadays, the countermeasures are by algorithm and education methods. However, people need to put more efforts in afterward process and measures. The effect is quite limited because the problem is not solved from root cause.

Our approach is to solve the problem from its source, ECG electrode and ECG electrode connector.

Now, we have 3 solutions below for your reference:

#1 Anti-noise electrode connector, Shieldy-Snap (SS-99)
https://www.nvk.com.tw/ecg-leadwires/shieldy-sanp.html

#2 Anti-noise ECG electrode, Black Sensor (GS-10):
https://www.nvk.com.tw/ecg-leadwires/shielded-connector-sensor.html

#3 Anti-noise ECG patch (Shield Sheet)
https://www.nvk.com.tw/ECG-electrodes/disposable-ecg-electrodes.html

NVK x HST

This research and development are working together with our partner HST (Health Science Technologies) from Tokyo, Japan. https://hst-jp.com/en/

We really appreciate this challenge and discovery from this important and meaningful topic. As a result, we hope these innovations will benefit the healthcare field, hospitals, frontline medical staffs, nurses and patients suffer from cardiac diseases.

Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24153215/

 

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