Alarm Fatigue
Reducing Alert Fatigue in Clinical Decision Support System
By Zoe Sallinger
Why is this important?
When working in a hospital, where there are monitors and alarms to alert staff of different things that are occuring with the patients, the beeps tend to blur together and are not as noticed as easily or even at all. There are a large amount of statistics that relate to not just the amount of alarms that go off during a shift but also the amount of negative outcomes that have occured due to these alarms being missed due to alarm fatigue. Some statistics state, "A children's hospital recorded 5,300 alarms in one day.", "One hospital documented an average of one million alarms in a single week.", and "Between January 2009 and June 2012, The Joint Commission received reports of 80 deaths and 13 severe injuries related to medical equipment alarms."
Relevance to Informatics
With having the alarms all sound the same or on a constant repeat, the beeps and alarms tend to fade into the background causing for people to miss the alarms. With the help of th informatics team a new alarm system could be created. By having the informatics team have different alarms and changing up the alarms periodically, the fatigue could be eliminated or decreased. With having different vibratiosn for differnt alerts on the hospital phone or pager the constant same sound or feeling would be gone allowing for the person needing to hear it actually notice it. Every 6 months or so, having an updated alert system would reduce the fatigue substantually.
How do we fix this, and how does it help our patients?
With a new and updated system, the constant training and updates would keep staff on their feet, and train their bodies to respond to the alarms rather than them fading in the background. This helps our patients by wait times for call bells being decreased, faster responses to codes, and change in vitals being picked up on at a more rapid rate etc. This also helps with good outcomes for the patients, less delays in care, and for staff less alarm fatigue.
Summary
Overall, by bringing in the informatics team to change the alarm sounds, vibrations on phones/pagers, and creating trainings for the new system and alarms, the rate of alarm fatigue would be decreased which in turn would decrease negative patient outcomes, and even deaths due to missed alarms. Updating alarms and constantly changing them, decreases the chance of them being missed.
Alarm Fatigue
Zoe Sallinger
Created on October 8, 2025
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Transcript
Alarm Fatigue
Reducing Alert Fatigue in Clinical Decision Support System
By Zoe Sallinger
Why is this important?
When working in a hospital, where there are monitors and alarms to alert staff of different things that are occuring with the patients, the beeps tend to blur together and are not as noticed as easily or even at all. There are a large amount of statistics that relate to not just the amount of alarms that go off during a shift but also the amount of negative outcomes that have occured due to these alarms being missed due to alarm fatigue. Some statistics state, "A children's hospital recorded 5,300 alarms in one day.", "One hospital documented an average of one million alarms in a single week.", and "Between January 2009 and June 2012, The Joint Commission received reports of 80 deaths and 13 severe injuries related to medical equipment alarms."
Relevance to Informatics
With having the alarms all sound the same or on a constant repeat, the beeps and alarms tend to fade into the background causing for people to miss the alarms. With the help of th informatics team a new alarm system could be created. By having the informatics team have different alarms and changing up the alarms periodically, the fatigue could be eliminated or decreased. With having different vibratiosn for differnt alerts on the hospital phone or pager the constant same sound or feeling would be gone allowing for the person needing to hear it actually notice it. Every 6 months or so, having an updated alert system would reduce the fatigue substantually.
How do we fix this, and how does it help our patients?
With a new and updated system, the constant training and updates would keep staff on their feet, and train their bodies to respond to the alarms rather than them fading in the background. This helps our patients by wait times for call bells being decreased, faster responses to codes, and change in vitals being picked up on at a more rapid rate etc. This also helps with good outcomes for the patients, less delays in care, and for staff less alarm fatigue.
Summary
Overall, by bringing in the informatics team to change the alarm sounds, vibrations on phones/pagers, and creating trainings for the new system and alarms, the rate of alarm fatigue would be decreased which in turn would decrease negative patient outcomes, and even deaths due to missed alarms. Updating alarms and constantly changing them, decreases the chance of them being missed.