Johns Hopkins intensive care nurse Nelly E. Lopez spends so much of her workday monitoring patient distress alarms that she sometimes hears phantom beeps even when she is no longer on the job. Hopkins doctors say Lopez's "alarm fatigue" shows what is wrong with hospital intensive care units, which they describe as fragmented systems made up of dozens of machines that don't talk to one another. Hopkins has a plan to bring ICUs into the 21st century and has joined forces with an unorthodox partner, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, to make it happen.
