Pushing for a more connected ICU—without adding more alarms

Incentive care units (ICUs) may be critical departments in any hospital, but as STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling writes, they haven’t changed much in the past few decades.

Unless you count adding more alarms.

“We have alarm fatigue. We’ve become numb to the noise and start to block them out,” said Rhonda Wyskiel, a former ICU nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital who now works at the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

The institute is directed by Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, a critical care physician at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who wants to create a “smart ICU.” One of the many steps to achieving his goal would be to roll back the “alarms race” between ICU devices like ventilators and pumps which beep very loudly, but don’t connect with each other.

He said this causes nurses to answer a false alarm every 90 seconds on average.

His improvements would include more mundane solutions, like installing $2 sensor to check the angles of beds, rather than have nurses use paper protractors before raising a patient’s bed to prevent pneumonia.

For more on the massive undertaking of reengineering the ICU and why experts say it’s both long overdue and very difficult to accomplish, click on the link below: