Enabling Secondary Alerting for Patient Monitoring

Abstract

Secondary alerting is the capability of a system to elevate a subset of standard alarms in a way that is useful clinicians. The purpose of leveraging a secondary alarming system is to create a distinction between highly relevant and actionable alarms, and less important alarms. In creating this distinction, we can address alarm fatigue, increasing patient safety and enhancing clinical workflow. While the use case for secondary alarming is well documented and often requested by clinical teams, these systems are rarely implemented in Canadian hospitals due to the challenge of technical implementation and management. At Mount Sinai Hospital, we have functioning secondary alerting systems in place for physiological monitoring in both our Intensive Care Unit, and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Furthermore, we are working towards implementing secondary alerting for vitals monitoring and smart bed alarms in our Medical/Surgical in patient floors. This presentation will lay out the steps taken to initiate the project, build the clinical decision making body, hire the correct vendors, design and build the technical system components, enable clinical training and orientation, and manage the system post-implementation. It will also highlight the importance of the Clinical Engineering team to facilitate the execution of this type of project.