Date:

24 October 2020

Track 3: Transforming Critical Care with Technologies

Presentation 1: Transforming Critical Care with Technologies (9.40am – 10.40am)

Presentation 2: Alarm Fatigue: The Unknown Pandemic (10:40am – 11:10am)

Presenter: Dr. Dirk Hüske-Kraus, Director Professional Services Delivery Innovation, Services & Solution
Delivery, Monitoring & Analytics, Philips Germany

Presentation Synopsis:

Alarm Fatigue, i.e. the tendency to react inadequately to alarms from medical devices as a consequence of too many non-actionable alarms has found an increased interest by the scientific community, governmental and regulatory bodies and professional societies. However, a clear and proven approach how to fight or prevent it, is still a desideratum. This is particularly deplorable since this not only is a patient safety issue, responsible for an unknown number of fatalities worldwide, but also that excessive alarms arguably have grave consequences on staff health. In the current Covid-19 pandemic, the situation is aggravated by improvised, makeshift ICUs and the fact that isolated patients are even more challenging from an alarm management point of view.

The talk highlights current scientific achievements with practical impact on alarm management in ICUs and delineates a rational approach to improving alarm management, in particular in the current situation.

Speaker Profile

Dr. Dirk Hüske-Kraus has been intensively engaged in research around alarm fatigue and alarm management, recently concluding a government funded project (“AlarmRedux”) on the topics of measuring alarm system quality, safely reducing avoidable alarms and novel ways to signal alarms. He has conducted successful projects to fight alarm fatigue in several European countries.

Other areas of interest:

• Environmental factors, in particular light and noise, in healthcare settings
• Design for Patient and Staff Safety
• Computational Linguistics for Medical Documents