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Alarms in medical equipment
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plummeting salaries for doctors means better average healthcare at all price points for the rest of us. Plus, play the tape forward. You're working 14 hour days and your pay has been halved in the last 5 years. What can you negotiate on? More pay probably isn't an option. How about working only 12 hour days for 6/7s the (already reduced) pay? That might be doable. In a decade, you might even be working a normal 9 to…
Negotiate? Just quit. At some point you're better off doing literally anything else with your limited time on this earth. Way too much time and effort for too little reward. Who's looking forward to doing a decade of hard training only to end up with some 9-5 job and salary? That's just absolute nonsense. Becoming a doctor is quite simply a stupid decision if you're not gonna get rich off it. You're replying to a cit…
Your profile indicates this is Brasil... Let me do a quick Google search.
"[T]he Brazilian healthcare system has achieved significant success in improving population coverage, reducing infant mortality rates [a 4-fold drop!], and controlling infectious diseases." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10231901/
It sounds like doctors are actually doing a much better job there nowadays than they were 35 years ago. The facts I see simply don't match your outrage.
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The airline industry went through this too and have moderated requirements to be more understanding of who it's consumers are and when. One of the big near miss cases was QF32 out of Singapore where they had over 50 alarms to deal with in addition the the emergency at hand. Alarm pollution is a real UI/UX dilemma.
58 faults on the ECAM. Source: https://youtu.be/a-4FBN8OTkk Props to Airbus for proper UX and information prioritization.
Huh, that title smells of tabloidization. I know about this incident, the "mid-air explosion" have to do with an uncontained disintegration of 1 turbine (with shrapnel flying that breached the wing, luckily not the fuselage), but the title makes it sound the whole plane exploded...
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe someone can train an AI to decide which alarms need immediate attention, given N staff members available.
Yikes I hope this is tongue-in-cheek, I definitely don't want a statistical process deciding whether to surface a life-critical alarm to healthcare staff
If it statistically saves lives?
It's the same as allowing full self driving cars which on average are safer than human drivers but sometimes accidentally drive into a fire truck because they couldn't train an image classifier to more accuracy than 99%.
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#105We're building a life critical medical device, and I haven't seen this mentioned, so I thought it was worth contributing: The use of these alarms is not something imposed by the manufacturers, but by the standards, eg 60601, 62304 etc. For devices involved in diagnostic, or more importantly interventional care, you are required to have alarms within certain auditory and visual thresholds, and a lot of them have manda…
this is very true with diabetes equipment since there is constant alerts (for example from insulin pumps) of low battery, undelivered insulin, etc. I think it definitely helps to give users the right amount of control if it's non life critical like a CGM or for insulin delivery.
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Alarm fatigue is a well documented problem in the medical field. Like residents who are getting a few hours of sleep over days worth of high-stress / high-stakes work, poor hand-washing between patients, and not clearly printing one's handwriting on prescription forms - all things that kill patients - doctors and hospital administrators just don't care enough. For a profession that is supposedly so pure moralit…
"They just didn't care enough" is an argument which can explain everything about how 1 person operates, half of a 10 person group, and roughly 0% of an entire profession. It's a question of the economic incentives at play far more than doctors universally deciding not to give a shit. The economic recommendation is to deregulate the medical personnel industry and allow supply to increase. A great many smart and good p…
The easiest way to increase the supply of physicians would be to increase Medicare funding for residency programs. We already have a surplus of smart and good people who would love to become doctors. Every year some of them graduate from medical school with an MD/DO degree but are unable to practice medicine because they don't get matched to a residency slot (some of them do get matched the following year).
There has already been deregulation to an extent. The scope of practice for lower licenses such as Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants has been increased in many states such that they are now allowed to perform most primary care services. This is a great option for other smart and good people who don't want to spend 3 - 7+ years in residency and take on enormous student loans.
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The airline industry went through this too and have moderated requirements to be more understanding of who it's consumers are and when. One of the big near miss cases was QF32 out of Singapore where they had over 50 alarms to deal with in addition the the emergency at hand. Alarm pollution is a real UI/UX dilemma.
Maybe someone can train an AI to decide which alarms need immediate attention, given N staff members available.
> Maybe someone can train an AI to decide which alarms need immediate attention, given N staff members available.
The words you've used could hypothetically mean some future artificial general intelligence that does not currently exist and there is no guarantee will ever exist, especially within the lifetimes of those participating in this thread. That could obviously be quite good.
"AI" as currently defined by marketing and pop culture to mean machine learning, large language models, etc. should never be allowed to make a medically important decision. We've already seen beyond any reasonable doubt how risky it is to even treat them as a natural language search engine, the idea of handing over life-or-death decisions to them is literally insane.
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The airline industry went through this too and have moderated requirements to be more understanding of who it's consumers are and when. One of the big near miss cases was QF32 out of Singapore where they had over 50 alarms to deal with in addition the the emergency at hand. Alarm pollution is a real UI/UX dilemma.
Maybe someone can train an AI to decide which alarms need immediate attention, given N staff members available.
The FDA would not let this fly. To get a device in the hospital, you have to enumerate EVERY failure mode that you can reasonably protect against, as well as the ones you can't. Some of these failures are crucial enough that they qualify to be required to implement an alarm for.
There's a reason everyone is so loud in the hospital, it's because we have to be to be there in the first place.
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#109We're building a life critical medical device, and I haven't seen this mentioned, so I thought it was worth contributing: The use of these alarms is not something imposed by the manufacturers, but by the standards, eg 60601, 62304 etc. For devices involved in diagnostic, or more importantly interventional care, you are required to have alarms within certain auditory and visual thresholds, and a lot of them have manda…
this is very true with diabetes equipment since there is constant alerts (for example from insulin pumps) of low battery, undelivered insulin, etc. I think it definitely helps to give users the right amount of control if it's non life critical like a CGM or for insulin delivery.
Insulin delivery is considered life critical by the FDA, because the failure modes of those devices can involve coma, brain damage, and even death. Some of those alarms will still be hardcoded, and for good reason!
Re: Alarms in medical equipment
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work as a field engineer on oilfields and rigs. We had panels of equipment, each with their own alarms and beeps. Once the rig manager (the client) remarked that we were ignoring the alarms, snidely insinuating that we should pay more attention given the possibility of things going wrong. The reality was we knew what was going on just by listening to the alarms. I could predict which alarm was going to go o…
Nope. Alarm fatigue is a well documented problem in the medical field. Like residents who are getting a few hours of sleep over days worth of high-stress / high-stakes work, poor hand-washing between patients, and not clearly printing one's handwriting on prescription forms - all things that kill patients - doctors and hospital administrators just don't care enough. For a profession that is supposedly so pure moralit…
Alarm fatigue is very real. And the lack of sleep is very real.
Where you go off the rails is with saying "don't care enough". This is a market problem, not a problem with individuals. "We don't overwork our people" isn't a selling point with insurance. The budget is pretty much fixed, a company that doesn't overwork their people ends up in the red.