Human judgment is better: Patient advocates and fatigue alarm

Liz Kowalczyk's recent articles in the Boston Globe highlighted the problem of alarm fatigue in Massachusetts hospitals. The noisy alarms are so often false alarms that staff learn to ignore them. Since most of the alarms are false alarms, ignoring them is usually harmless. But sometimes, of course, the alarms are genuine. One set of disregarded alarms led to the death of Madeline Warner in a Massachusetts hospital. Alarms had sounded for 75 minutes, warning that her heart monitor's battery needed to be replaced. Kowalczyk found that hundreds of deaths had been causes by such alarm fatigue in the last five years; indeed, this probably represents only the tip of an iceberg.

"If there were an obvious solution to this problem, we would have done’" it, said Dr. James Bagian, the former chief patient safety officer for the Veterans Administration hospitals, where he said there have been multiple patient deaths and close calls because alarms were turned off or the volume was turned down. "No one has one."

I disagree. There may well not be a technical solution now, given the current state of technology. Human judgment is better. But most humans in hospitals are busy taking care of numerous patients. A dedicated patient advocate, on the other hand, is focused on a single patient. When family members acting as advocates, or professional patient advocates, insist on a Rapid Response by hospital staff, for example, in a de facto humanly-triggered alarm, about half the Rapid Responses are later ascertained as valid, with the benefit of hindsight. That true positive rate of 50% is far higher than the true positive rate of machine alarms. That is one of the most powerful reasons why people should bring a patient advocate, preferably a professional, into the hospital with them.

Advice to hospitalized patients: Bring a patient advocate with you.

Read another story on hospital Rapid Response methods.