Texas Children's Hospital in Houston has won the 10th Annual Health Devices Achievement Award from ECRI Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving patient care.
The award recognizes an outstanding initiative undertaken by an ECRI Institute member healthcare institution that improves patient safety, reduces costs, or otherwise facilitates better strategic management of health technology.
The winning submission, "Alarm Management Reboot," describes Texas Children's successful effort to improve patient safety by incorporating enterprise-wide alarm management practices to make alarms more meaningful and actionable.
Spearheading the project, Texas Children's alarm management steering team started with a baseline analysis of the current alarm management program. The team also laid out the Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goal into an action plan, which designated specific operations necessary to meet the phases of the patient safety goal.
Ultimately, Texas Children's partnered with an outside organization to develop an alarm dashboard—a system that allowed the team to collect and analyze alarm data by care area, by nurse, and by patient. Simple changes soon progressed into patient-specific alarm dashboards that helped the care team make decisions around alarm settings.
"We realized that substantive changes were needed to shift focus from the number of alarms, to actionable information based on an analytic dashboard," said John Weimert, director of biomedical engineering at Texas Children's. "This project aligned people, technology, and governance to meet the common goal of improving patient safety."
David Jamison, executive director, health technology evaluation and safety at the ECRI Institute, added: “ECRI congratulates Texas Children's for their winning submission. With the Joint Commission's 2016 patient safety goal on the minds of hospital leaders, this project came at the perfect time. The team did an admirable job of revamping their alarm management program with an in-depth assessment of the environment at the patient's bedside. The actionable approach Texas Children's took to stop alarm fatigue provides a good example for hospitals nationwide.”
Texas Children's Hospital, David Jamison, US
