The following description about alarms and inops corresponds to the first group of waveforms collected (approximately 2,800 patient records). All are adults where the Case_ID's are numbered less than a44000.
Simultaneously with approximately 10,000 patient-days of waveforms and trends, we have collected over 450,000 alarms and inops. This amounts to a frequency of one alarm or alert every thirty minutes for each patient in the hospital, although most of these are not life-threatening. Tables 2.6 and 2.7 list the types of alarms and inops (non-physiological alerts such as machine disconnections) gathered by our data collection system. A three-star alarm is a potentially life-threatening condition that requires immediate attention. Two-star alarms require less immediate attention, although may provide warning of an increased risk of adverse problems in a patient over time. Note that most of these alarms are not verified as correct. In particular, the .alarm are all unverified. A subset of alarms (with the .alM extension) are verified by humans, and are described in the next section.
 |
