By Ellie Gabel, Associate Editor, Revolutionized
LinkedIn: Elle Rose
LinkedIn: Revolutionized
Electronic health record notifications, security warnings and clinical alarms are meant to advise clinicians on everything from drug allergies to dosage contradictions. They play crucial roles in improving patient outlook. However, in excess, they can cause alert fatigue, a condition that decreases responsiveness and increases the likelihood of a breach and other significant issues.
Alarms Are Overwhelming Clinicians
Notifications can appear at inopportune times. For example, a low-priority alert about a mild drug interaction might occur during cardiac resuscitation. Clinicians cannot halt their lifesaving measures to address minor side effects of little clinical significance.
Although around 76% of physicians find these reminders helpful, a larger proportion experience alert fatigue. Over 80% agree they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume they receive. As a result, 55% admitted to dismissing them without reading them.
Many health care professionals ignore irrelevant or low-priority warnings because there are simply too many to review adequately. Alert fatigue even affects health care information technology (IT) professionals.
As the number of security notifications increases, their responsiveness simultaneously diminishes because they become desensitized. Handling pages and pages of support tickets and security logs can leave them feeling burned out.
The Threat of Alert and Alarm Fatigue
Medical equipment produces a cacophony of beeps, sirens, ringing and chirps. Each one is supposed to serve a vital service, but they can easily become background noise. Over time, health care professionals may begin to view them as unimportant. In one survey, around 50% of nurses agreed that frequent nuisance alarms reduce their trust in alarms altogether.
If a clinician accidentally overlooks an important alarm, their patient’s condition may worsen, and if dozens or hundreds of the facility’s workers are doing the same, the problem becomes significant.
The threat of alert fatigue also extends to the digital realm. If IT teams are overwhelmed with false positives, they may overlook genuine cyberthreats. Hackers could exfiltrate personally identifiable and protected health information in the event of a data breach.
Say a hacker infiltrates the network. The security system sends a warning, but the IT professionals are so used to false positives that they ignore it. A week later, the bad actor causes critical systems to malfunction, forcing the hospital to pay a ransom. This could jeopardize patients’ lives and lead to reputational and financial damage.
Achieving Unified Alert Management
Large health care facilities may have larger IT teams, but alert fatigue remains an issue because there are too many flags to review manually. Those at organizations with more than 5,000 employees ignore around 23% of security alerts due to the volume they must review. If even one is a critical threat, they risk adverse effects.
Human error is the unifying theme. Even the most cautious and experienced professionals make mistakes, and overlooking even one critical alert could lead to a massive data breach. From an IT perspective, relying solely on human intervention against digital threats is not a strategic approach.
Achieving unified alert management requires administrators to rethink their cybersecurity and clinical approaches. Modern health technology should be a fundamental part of their defense. Streamlining or automating log monitoring will decrease alert fatigue and allow workers to focus on more value-adding tasks. Systems like notification tiering and knowledge sharing also help.
Autonomous technologies require a vast amount of relevant, accurate information to perform effectively. Decision-makers should eliminate siloes and refine their data feeds to give their new approach a solid foundation.
How to Source Actionable Intelligence
Real-time data and advanced analytics can take a good strategy to the next level. Administrators should consider leveraging internet-connected wearables or artificial intelligence tools.
Remote Patient Monitoring
A wearable remote patient monitoring device with a built-in early warning scoring system can provide relevant, actionable insights when it matters most, simplifying the hospital soundscape. Research shows it helps clinicians in general wards detect patient deterioration 29 to 40 hours faster on average. Early intervention can help decrease the number of critical alarms.
Wearables centralize clinical information, and professionals can configure them to prioritize variables on a patient-by-patient basis, minimizing the volume of nuisance alarms.
Machine Learning System
A study from Vanderbilt University Medical Center found that machine learning can refine computer alerts, supporting day-to-day clinical decision-making. Past work has revealed that one model can suppress over 50% of medication alerts with an impressive false negative rate of 0.9%.
The research team wanted to enhance the effectiveness of their model in real-world clinical settings, so they attempted it again. They improved alert criteria using explainable AI, which is superior to the conventional rules-based alternative. It supports rather than eliminates the role of human intervention.
Eliminating Alert Fatigue in Hospitals
Today, most health care professionals are overwhelmed by, and often admit to ignoring, alarms and alerts. Modernizing the technology stack could provide them with clarity and save them time, allowing them to focus on their core duties. Addressing alert fatigue directly enhances patient safety and cybersecurity by ensuring critical alerts are promptly recognized and acted upon.