NCT02458872

Impact of a Data-driven Monitor Alarm Reduction Strategy Implemented in Safety Huddles

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 77,280 (actual)
• Sponsor: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

This is a pragmatic, paired, cluster-randomized controlled trial evaluating the impact of a safety huddle-based intervention on physiologic monitor alarm rates on pediatric inpatient units.

Detailed description

Hospital physiologic monitors can alert clinicians to early signs of physiologic deterioration, and thus have great potential to be life-saving. However, monitors generate frequent alarms, most of which are non-actionable. When clinicians become overburdened with alarms, they begin to exhibit alarm fatigue: responding more slowly to alarms or ignoring alarms entirely. In this protocol the investigators outline the methods they will use to evaluate the impact of a safety huddle-based intervention on physiologic monitor alarm rates using a pragmatic, paired, cluster-randomized controlled trial with the intervention delivered at the unit level. This work is considered quality improvement research, and some of the approaches described in this protocol are from the field of quality improvement. Currently, at most hospitals data like this on the numbers of alarms that patients generate are only available to researchers with the software tools needed to interrogate and record data from the monitor network. The goal of this proposal is to bring this data to the safety huddles occurring daily on inpatient units in an accessible format to help teams make informed decisions about monitoring and minimize the potential of harm from alarm fatigue.

Conditions

• Hospitalization

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	safety huddle alarm intervention	The intervention consists of a monitor alarm dashboard that displays the numbers and types of alarms for each patient, and an accompanying checklist to guide data-driven discussion of 2-4 patients with high alarm rates.

Timeline

• Start date: 2015-07-01
• Primary completion: 2016-05-01
• Completion: 2016-05-01
• First posted: 2015-06-01
• Last updated: 2017-06-02

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States