We’re proud to announce that Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) won the ECRI Health Devices Achievement Award.
This outstanding accomplishment was a result of our collaborative effort with them to use patient-centric alarm dashboards at the point of care for ongoing alarm noise reduction and improved care, experience, and team communication.
The Objective
TCH reached out to us a few years ago to discuss alarm management. They were looking for a way to meet National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG), make alarms actionable, improve patient experience, and reduce alarm fatigue.
The Approach
Our teams worked together to perform a baseline analysis to determine their current state and came up with actionable recommendations for initial alarm noise reduction.
Over the course of 3-6 months, TCH accepted those suggestions and implemented them one by one using a PDSA deployment strategy and our Alarm Watch alarm analytics dashboards to test the impact.
They also used Alarm Watch at the point of care within their daily workflow process to manage staff assignments, look for ongoing improvements, and access patient-centric decision support tools to make informed decisions about alarm limit changes.
What became quickly evident to TCH was that these dashboards not only helped them reduce alarm noise, but also gave additional insight into when and if care plans needed to be modified. In fact, they found that 50% of the time they would change alarm limits, but for the other 50%, they actually made changes to patient care.
The Results
Through ongoing collaboration, TCH was able to meet NPSG goals in less than six months and continues to see a reduction in alarm noise.
However, the greater impact of this project has been on their shift in culture to a team based approach around alarms. The conversation is no longer about “alarm management” – it is now about “patient care”.
The dashboards we created with TCH helped give them the tools they need to improve care team communication, as well as the tools evidence nursing staff needs to back up their recommendations. The doctors can now see all the alarms that the nurse has been complaining about. More importantly, the team now has the decision support tools to do something about it. And being able to doing something about it, has led to improved patient experience and improved care and outcomes.
We believe this last point was the reason TCH received the ECRI award; because they were able to demonstrate using technology to improve care and safety for individual patients.
Want to Learn More?
You can start with an article about the ECRI award in Health Facilities Management. Or, for more complete details on the project listen to the AAMI webinar replay from this fall featuring Samantha Jacques, former Director of Biomed at TCH.
If you would like to discuss your alarm management project and see Alarm Watch in action, Contact us today.
