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Research Studies is a compilation of published research articles funded by AHRQ or authored by AHRQ researchers.
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1 to 1 of 1 Research Studies DisplayedHansen CJ, Rayo MF, Patterson ES
Perceptually discriminating the highest priority alarms reduces response time: a retrospective pre-post study at four hospitals.
Emergency alarms are the most urgent of hospital alarms, necessitating immediate attention and action to address a dangerous situation. These alarms are triggered by clinicians and have greater positive predictive value (PPV). High-priority alarms are different from emergency alarms, are automatically triggered, and have lower PPV. The purpose of this retrospective pre-post study was to decrease nurse response time for emergency alarms and high-priority alarms by improving the discernability between emergency alarms and all other alarms, as well as by suppressing redundant and false alarms in a secondary alarm notification system (SANS). The researchers analyzed data 15 months prior to and 25 months after a SANS redesign was implemented in four hospitals. For emergency alarms, the researchers integrated digitized human speech features to distinguish the emergency alarms from the automatically triggered alarms, leaving their onset and escalation pathways unaltered. The researchers suppressed some of the automatically triggered alarms by delaying their initial onset and escalation by 20 seconds. The study found that response time for emergency alarms decreased at all hospitals ad the improvements were sustained. The use of automatically triggered alarms decreased 25.0%. Response time for the three automatically triggered cardiac alarms increased at the four hospitals.
AHRQ-funded; HS024379.
Citation: Hansen CJ, Rayo MF, Patterson ES .
Perceptually discriminating the highest priority alarms reduces response time: a retrospective pre-post study at four hospitals.
Hum Factors 2023 Jun; 65(4):636-50. doi: 10.1177/00187208211032870..
Keywords: Hospitals, Nursing