Comment by tantalor 2 months ago
Thanks for posting this! Much better source than CBC article.
I found this interesting:
> 1 truly alerted patient for every 2 falsely alerted patients was deemed an acceptable number of false alarms
I don't know...If every 3rd time I was alerted it was some relatively serious issue, vs how often there is a serious issue when just doing rounds that you stumble upon, I'd think that would be a pretty good alert rate compared to the norm. But then again, I'm not in healthcare.
Essentially, it depends on workplace integration, i.e. how much effort it takes to discover the alert trigger. From personal experience, I'd say the upper limit of inconvenience is 'click the alert' on mobile, and 'move mouse on alert label to see tooltip' on desktop. Anything more will be quickly discarded, especially if it involves a popup or opens a new window.
While alarm fatigue is a real thing, the finding from this study is that they didn't, which is what matters.
Interesting, and I think it makes sense.
In an ideal world, the nurse to patient ratio would be high enough that patients could be seen on regular rotation frequently. I've never been in a hospital where this was the case. So a system that can correctly prioritize resources for critical cases even if it's pulling resources away from non-critical cases will probably result in a net improved outcome.