Hospital tones down alarms to reduce fatigue, enhance safety

After a night shift at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Todd Ostlund would go home and switch off his phone ringer and anything else mimicking the many, many alarms a nurse hears while on duty. And still, on many nights, he'd be roused from sleep by a "beep, beep, beep" in his dreams. Medical device alarms play critical roles in a hospital — to signal trouble with a patient's vital signs or medical equipment, and to draw caregivers to the bedside in time to help. But too often, alarms have been nuisances — set off by patient movements that cause their pulse to spike briefly, or by a momentary kink in an IV line, or patients simply scratching their noses and bumping the blood oxygen monitors on their fingers.