Virtua Memorial Hospital and vendor Bernoulli worked together to nearly eliminate respiratory depression alerts, enhance care, and lower costs, reports Healthcare IT News.
Using only sustained alarms as the filter for notifications reduced alerts from 22,812 to 13,000, a number high enough to still cause alarm fatigue. However, passing multiple series of data through a multi-variable rules engine that monitored the values of pulse, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and end-tidal carbon dioxide in order to determine which alarms to send to the nurse-call phone system brought the number of respiratory depression alerts down to 209 – a 99 percent reduction, the hospital reported.
