Clinical Alarm Suppression via Event Counting
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Solution Overview
Problem
Clinical alarm fatigue occurs due to numerous false alarms from short duration, transitory patient events, which can lead to clinicians ignoring critical alerts, potentially jeopardizing patient health.
Innovation Solution
A notification system that suppresses alarms for short duration events but generates a single alert if a predetermined number of such events occur within a specified period, using an event counter and programmable thresholds to differentiate between clinically significant and insignificant events.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the monitor generates an alarm for every detected event below threshold, then all clinically significant events are reported, but clinicians experience alarm fatigue from numerous false alarms
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by differentiating between transient and sustained events based on their temporal characteristics. Instead of treating all threshold violations uniformly, the system evaluates the duration and persistence of each event locally, generating alarms only for sustained conditions that meet predetermined time criteria, thereby filtering out transient false alarms while maintaining reliability for true events
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary action by monitoring and counting threshold violations over a predetermined time period before generating an alarm. This advance evaluation of event persistence allows the system to distinguish between transient noise and sustained clinical conditions, preventing alarm fatigue while ensuring reliable reporting of true events
2Object-generated harmful factors
If the monitor suspends alarms for short duration events, then alarm fatigue is reduced, but clinically significant sustained events may be missed
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary monitoring and counting of threshold violations over a predetermined time period before making the decision to generate or suppress an alarm. This advance evaluation ensures that only sustained events meeting the time criterion trigger alarms, while transient events are filtered out, thereby reducing nuisance alarms without missing clinically significant sustained conditions
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses feedback by continuously monitoring the accumulation of threshold violations and comparing the count against a predetermined threshold. This feedback mechanism dynamically adjusts alarm generation based on the sustained nature of events, ensuring that clinically significant sustained events are detected while transient events are suppressed
3Object-generated harmful factors
If multiple physiological parameters must be violated simultaneously to generate an alarm, then false alarms are reduced, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by focusing the complexity reduction on the temporal dimension of event evaluation. Instead of requiring multiple parameter violations, the system evaluates the persistence of single parameter violations over time, using predetermined time criteria to distinguish transient from sustained events. This approach reduces false alarms while maintaining simpler alarm generation logic compared to multi-parameter requirements
Data Source
AI summary
A clinical facility communication network connects a notification system to a plurality of patient monitors and to a plurality of clinician communication devices. Each of the patient monitors operate to detect physiological characteristics associated with a patient and to send event messages to the notification system. The notification system operates to receive the event messages and to determine which of the event messages include information of sufficient clinical significance to warrant generating and sending an alarm to a clinician. The event messages that are determine not to include clinically significant information are ignored.