The Challenge

Alarm fatigue is a growing concern in healthcare. Put, alarm fatigue refers to sensory overload experienced by clinicians due to exposure to an excessive volume of non-clinically significant alarm notifications. The phenomenon can lead to clinicians ignoring alerts or deactivating or silencing clinical alert equipment/devices in severe cases. 

The Solution

The Ascom alert management system can filter, combine, and prioritise alerts from Mindray’s monitoring system based on predefined policies and send them to the designated care providers. This turns the threshold-based alarm notifications into actionable alerts based on the clinical understanding of whether an alert or combination of alerts requires immediate staff actions.

Despite the greatly improved accuracy of alarm notifications, the traditional way of presenting alerts via bedside equipment is not the most effective method to gain the attention of increasingly mobile clinicians. With the Ascom alert management system, however, you can assign clinicians to specific patients and send notifications of monitor alarms directly to their mobile devices. Should a designated be unable to respond appropriately, the alert is routed to pre-defined colleagues. This helps maximise staff awareness of changing patient conditions and helps ensure prompt and appropriate responses and interventions.

Care providers can also use the Ascom alert management system to view waveforms and access key data to understand an alert’s context and significance better. Using Mindray MobileViewer on their mobile devices, care providers can also check patients’ real-time monitoring parameters and live waveforms anytime while moving around their facility. This makes it easier for the care providers to handle alarm notifications as efficiently as possible.

• Integrate any bedside medical device having the capacity to export data
• Make alerts more meaningful through customised alerts notification strategies
• Help increase the responsiveness of care providers by delivering alerts to designated clinicians and redirecting alerts to colleagues when necessary
• Enable immediate response to alerts through the Ascom Myco 3 smartphone with Unite Axess and Digistat Smart Central mobile apps for alert management
• Provide detailed and context-rich alerts by including waveforms with the alert notifications