Alarm Fatigue¶
Sendelbach, S., & Funk, M. (2013). Alarm Fatigue: A Patient Safety Concern. AACN Advanced Critical Care, 24(4), 378-386.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Alertness
- This decomposition makes otherwise puzzling phenomena legible: the vigilance decrement is degraded alertness with intact attention; alarm fatigue is overloaded alertness combined with collapsed salience-against-background; the expert's "I just had a feeling about that one" is high alertness operating below the deliberative threshold.
This sourceEstablishes alarm fatigue — sensory overload and desensitization under excessive (mostly false) alarms — the collapse of alertness when salience-against-background erodes.
- This decomposition makes otherwise puzzling phenomena legible: the vigilance decrement is degraded alertness with intact attention; alarm fatigue is overloaded alertness combined with collapsed salience-against-background; the expert's "I just had a feeling about that one" is high alertness operating below the deliberative threshold.
- Habituation to Repeated Signal
- Patient-safety alarms ("alarm fatigue"): the canonical case — ICU and OR patients trigger hundreds of mostly non-actionable alarms per day, clinicians rationally learn to ignore the channel, and the rare actionable alarm goes unanswered.
This sourceDocuments ICU alarm fatigue — that 72%–99% of clinical alarms are false and the resulting desensitization drives clinicians to rationally discount the channel, with patient deaths attributed to it.
- Patient-safety alarms ("alarm fatigue"): the canonical case — ICU and OR patients trigger hundreds of mostly non-actionable alarms per day, clinicians rationally learn to ignore the channel, and the rare actionable alarm goes unanswered.
- Salience
- In the ICU, the field of candidates is the stream of physiological events; the feature space includes heart-rate excursion, oxygen-saturation drop, and rate-of-change;
This sourceReviews ICU physiological-alarm design, the 72-99% false-alarm rate, and the desensitization/habituation that erodes effective alarm salience under saturated alarm backgrounds.
- In the ICU, the field of candidates is the stream of physiological events; the feature space includes heart-rate excursion, oxygen-saturation drop, and rate-of-change;
- Signal Inflation
- A clinician trained on alarm fatigue recognizes alert fatigue in security operations centers, push-notification fatigue in consumer products, and warning-system erosion in atmospheric science as instances of the same problem, and the cross-domain recognition is so strong that the medical and IT communities literally share the term "alert fatigue."
This sourceDocuments alarm fatigue as a cross-domain patient-safety problem (72–99% of clinical alarms false); the term 'alert fatigue' is shared between medicine and information technology.
- A clinician trained on alarm fatigue recognizes alert fatigue in security operations centers, push-notification fatigue in consumer products, and warning-system erosion in atmospheric science as instances of the same problem, and the cross-domain recognition is so strong that the medical and IT communities literally share the term "alert fatigue."
Mechanisms¶
- Critical Dependency Dashboard
- Over-alerting is the opposite trap: too many amber tiles and people stop looking, so the one real signal is missed in the noise
This sourceFinds that excessive alarms create sensory overload and desensitization, causing important alarms to be missed.
- Over-alerting is the opposite trap: too many amber tiles and people stop looking, so the one real signal is missed in the noise
- Response-Obligation Matrix
- Its sharpest failure mode is self-inflicted — a matrix tuned to escalate too much manufactures its own tempo trap through alert fatigue, where responders face more "review / escalate" events than they can act on and begin dismissing everything, including the real one.
This sourceLinks excessive, predominantly false alarms to overload, desensitization, and missed clinically significant alarms.
- Its sharpest failure mode is self-inflicted — a matrix tuned to escalate too much manufactures its own tempo trap through alert fatigue, where responders face more "review / escalate" events than they can act on and begin dismissing everything, including the real one.
- SLA Escalation
- And when escalation triggers are set so loose that everything escalates, the alerts lose meaning and responders tune them out — alert fatigue — so the truly at-risk item is missed in the noise.
This sourceDefines alarm fatigue as overload from excessive alarms that causes desensitization and can lead to missed alarms.
- And when escalation triggers are set so loose that everything escalates, the alerts lose meaning and responders tune them out — alert fatigue — so the truly at-risk item is missed in the noise.
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
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