Excel Medical Electronics Introduces AlarmNavigator™ to Address Alarm Fatigue

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Excel Medical Electronics (EME), developers of the BedMasterEx data acquisition and reporting system, has introduced an AlarmNavigator product for supporting hospitals in their efforts to comply with The Joint Commission’s 2014 National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) on alarm safety.

 

Alarm fatigue occurs in hospitals when the nursing staff becomes desensitized to the cacophony of alarm sounds (many of them not clinically actionable) which are generated by various medical devices.  This can contribute to nurses missing alerts critical to patient safety. Audible alarm alerts add to the level of noise within the care area, which can also negatively impact the patient’s overall recovery. The Joint Commission’s 2014 NPSG is focused on reducing the total number of non-actionable alarms, allowing nurses to focus on issues important to patient care and safety.

 

AlarmNavigator is an administrative tool, which hospitals may use to answer four key questions about their patient monitoring alarm environment:

 

  • How many alarms do we have?
  • What kinds of alarms do we have?
  • How is our alarm environment different in each care unit?
  • How will we measure improvement as we implement changes?

 

“AlarmNavigator is a unique web-based application that is fully scalable, allowing hospitals of any size to identify and quantify their alarm conditions and to generate meaningful reports that enable evidence-based decision making when approaching the clinical alarm challenge,” said John Hoffman, president of EME. “It enables hospitals to harvest already available alarm data from patient monitoring systems by utilizing a software-only solution that leverages existing hospital IT infrastructure.”

 

In addition to BedMasterEx and AlarmNavigator, EME also offers their BedComm product for medical device integration and the StreamingAnalytics Platform for research used in medical algorithm development.

 

Additional information is available on the EME website at www.excel-medical.com or contact Paul McGurgan, National Program Manager, Alarm Fatigue Initiatives at alarms@excel-medical.com.