Nihon Kohden, a U.S.-market leader in medical instrumentation solutions, has launched the new Aware Alarm Management and Reporting software system designed to help hospitals improve alarm management and reduce alarm fatigue.
The system builds on Nihon Kohden’s ReportKonnect functionality, and is designed to help healthcare facilities meet alarm management and reporting guidelines issued by The Joint Commission. Clinical consulting services will also be offered by company Nurse Executives to facilitate comprehensive and sustainable alarm management results.
Alarm management has been a growing issue for several years because alarm systems are a key component of many of today’s medical devices, including bedside monitors, telemetry, central station monitors, ventilators as well as stand-alone physiologic monitors, such as pulse oximeters and non-invasive blood pressure monitors.
According to a 2013 report by The Joint Commission, as many as 85 percent to 99 percent of alarms do not require clinical intervention, which can lead to clinicians becoming desensitized to their sound.
As a result, The Joint Commission established guidelines in its 2013 National Patient Safety Goals that called for hospitals to develop staff education programs and implement protocols for alarm reporting and data management policies. The first of the two-part phased goal went into effect in 2014, with the final part of the goal implemented Jan. 1, 2016.
Nihon Kohden developed its Aware Alarm Management and Reporting software system to allow hospitals to quickly aggregate alarm data by time, date and care setting, which can help identify alarms with the highest frequency. Hospitals can then use the Aware data to educate staff on the importance of alarm management while also developing and executing protocols for alarm reporting and data management policies.
As part of the Aware offering, Nihon Kohden’s Nurse Executives are available to help nursing leadership and other key stakeholders identify ways to reduce nuisance alarms, perform patient touch-point assessments and review alarm settings for goal-based optimization.
"With Aware Alarm Management and Reporting, hospitals can easily produce the reports required to drive data that assists hospitals in meeting The Joint Commission guidelines. In addition, the reporting tool can help the hospital quantify the improvements they are able to make through staff education, adjustments and protocols," said Veffa Devers, vice president of clinical excellence programs at Nihon Kohden. "By eliminating nuisance alarms, clinicians can devote time to what matters most: patient care and timely response to actionable alarms."
Nihon Kohden has been at the forefront of alarm management, building tool sets into its technology that include reporting tools, as well as customizable settings in standard monitoring tools. The company remains focused and dedicated to helping hospitals reduce and eliminate nuisance alarms by implementing best practices, such as increasing advisory alarm time, adding programmable SpO2 alarm delay and applying Nihon Kohden’s Prefense® smoothing algorithm.