Health Tech Leader Uses AI to Improve Nurse Retention and Patient Outcomes by Reducing Alarm Fatigue in Intensive Care Units (ICUs)
CalmWave, the company leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to bring Operations Health to hospitals, today announced it has won the prestigious Best UX Design at the 2023 GeekWire Awards. CalmWave uses AI to gauge hospitals’ Operations Health to improve nurse retention and patient outcomes by reducing alarm fatigue in intensive care units (ICUs).
“We are grateful to GeekWire for recognizing our innovation. The complexity and chaos in today’s ICUs cannot be underestimated. Our UX design, which puts clinicians at the forefront, is reshaping this landscape, providing users and patients with an entirely improved experience,” said Ophir Ronen, founder and CEO, CalmWave. “A distinguishing feature of CalmWave is our emphasis on utilizing AI to present clinicians with a clearer, more insightful understanding of vast volumes of data, making it more understandable and actionable. Hospital data is growing at a meteoric rate, causing increased disorder and cognitive overload. Our nurses and patients deserve better.”
By using advanced machine learning techniques, it is possible to provide more accurate alarm parameters, early warning alerts by patient category or even individual patient. This information can also be used along with other vital data inputs to provide an overall measure of clinician workload. In concert, these tools can reduce (unnecessary) alarms, orchestrate staffing, track employee health, and improve patient outcomes.
Nearly 80% of alarms in ICUs are non-actionable alarms. Combined with 12-hour work shifts, unbalanced nurse-to-patient ratios, and COVID-19’s pressure on an already stressed healthcare system, nurses are nearly guaranteed to experience alarm fatigue and overall workplace exhaustion.
CalmWave’s platform uses AI and expert services to help healthcare organizations optimize operations and make data-informed decisions. Utilizing a healthcare organization’s data and machine generated signals, CalmWave transparently empowers leadership to manage staff more efficiently, reduce turnover rates, and improve patient outcomes.
CalmWave’s UX Design
CalmWave’s intuitive, web-based user interface is focused on delivering what is typically very complicated and messy patient information (i.e., vital signs, labs, medications, electronic medical record data, etc.) in a simple and digestible format. The status quo for healthcare companies is to show six-foot-wide monitors displaying 30 patients’ vital signs data while each monitor is constantly ringing with alarms. This quickly creates cognitive overload for clinicians tasked with monitoring the health of their patients. The CalmWave approach is very different given their origins in the Enterprise IT world, for they understand how to distill and display critical information without compromising on quality or efficacy.
CalmWave Platform Features
- Smart Alarms intelligently group alarms into “incidents” based on alert buffering, false alarm probability indicators, added inputs for medications, and early warning indicators
- Device parameters customized to each patient’s physiology & Alarm Monitoring to optimize devices for alarm reduction
- Intelligent Patient Acuity to provide a comprehensive score of each patient’s condition based on real-time insights
- Staff Orchestration to optimize staff workloads based on patient acuity and alarm volume and to update scheduling for improved staff retention
- Insights & Analytics for all users – nurses, managers, administrators, IT, and executives – within an easy-to-navigate command center
- Expert Services engagements are built into the platform to provide assessment, training, consultation, implementation, and, most importantly, measurable and objective improvement.