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Alarms in medical equipment

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Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#91

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #87
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> deregulate the medical personnel industry and allow supply to increase And salaries to plummet. Who's gonna be the first to volunteer to spend about 14 hours of their day in some shithole hospital nearly every day sacrificing their own health and sanity for the sake of others, all while making a fraction of what people here make? Deny people their prosperity and suddenly going to medical school turns into a stupid…

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 5 again. The horror!

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#92

Post by matheusmoreira »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #91
matheusmoreira wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deregulate the medical personnel industry and allow supply to increase And salaries to plummet. Who's gonna be the first to volunteer to spend about 14 hours of their day in some shithole hospital nearly every day sacrificing their own health and sanity for the sake of others, all while making a fraction of what people here make? Deny people their prosperity and suddenly going to medical school turns into a stupid…

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 citizen of a country which implemented your idea and then some. Believe it when I say the "get into medical school and you're set for life" meme has worn off.

You haven't seen the damage that stupid indebted underpaid doctors are capable of causing. I'm actually afraid of getting sick. Killing patients? I've seen worse.

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#93

Post by [deleted] »

krisoft wrote: post #62
varjag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that be pull backward?

What i heard is that it is designed to imitate the stick sensation smaller airplanes have as the wind buffets the controll surfaces when a stall develops. And pilots from an early stage in their flying training conditioned to push the stick forward when that happens.

[deleted]

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#94

Post by matheusmoreira »

_yb2s wrote: post #50
LorenPechtel wrote: post #4

And how about the fact that there are simply too many of them! I was once in the recovery room with my wife. For some reason the sensor was having a very hard time reading her pulse. The normal bips would frequently fail. Too many failures in a row and the alarm would start it's EEEEEE scream we've all seen from Hollywood. It would shut up as soon as it managed to pick up a beat. Hers was definitely not the only one…

Hospitals have a sort of manic "New York Stock Exchange" energy and environment to them... The entire environment of a modern hospital seems brutally incompatible with the type of peaceful relaxing environment you'd want to reduce stress and improve patient outcomes. Bright lights, constant noise, loud electronics, preventing patients from sleeping based on whatever schedule is convenient to medical staff, etc. I thi…

Hospitals are not "peaceful relaxing environments". They are large scale industrial operations designed to process as many people as possible. There simply aren't enough resources to afford every single person a "relaxing environment". You do the best you can for as many as you can. All this "relaxation" stuff will quickly be converted into spare capacity the second large numbers of severely wounded people start showing up at the emergency room.

If you're a multibillionaire then obviously you can just hire and equip your own private medical team that will focus 100% of their attention and care exclusively on you and your needs. The vast majority of the humans will never have that luxury. Normal people enter the system and are processed like everyone else.

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#95

Post by amelius »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #80
ijustlovemath wrote: post #76

We'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…

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.

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#96

Post by gravescale »

_yb2s wrote: post #50
LorenPechtel wrote: post #4

And how about the fact that there are simply too many of them! I was once in the recovery room with my wife. For some reason the sensor was having a very hard time reading her pulse. The normal bips would frequently fail. Too many failures in a row and the alarm would start it's EEEEEE scream we've all seen from Hollywood. It would shut up as soon as it managed to pick up a beat. Hers was definitely not the only one…

Hospitals have a sort of manic "New York Stock Exchange" energy and environment to them... The entire environment of a modern hospital seems brutally incompatible with the type of peaceful relaxing environment you'd want to reduce stress and improve patient outcomes. Bright lights, constant noise, loud electronics, preventing patients from sleeping based on whatever schedule is convenient to medical staff, etc. I thi…

I honestly believe that a pair or noise cancelling headphones and an eye mask would have statistically noticable effects on outcomes. The bright, noisy environment of a hospital makes good, natural sleep basically impossible and that is brutal on even healthy people.

My ward even managed to have the (networked digitally controlled, and do presumably very expensive) lighting set up so the night lighting was inside the curtains and shining directly into the bed spaces, and the main ward lights would come up if you touched the wrong thing (even the nurses weren't quite sure exactly what the proximal causes of lighting changes was). With the pumps alarming the whole time (about once per night, per patient, up to 20 minutes until resolution each time) plus all the other regular medical checks preventing any extended quiet time, it was absolutely exhausting at a very deep level.

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#97

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #80
ijustlovemath wrote: post #76

We'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…

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.

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#98

Post by heavenlyblue »

makeitdouble wrote: post #57
teeray wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those companies fall into the trap of “well, we’d rather a noisy alarm that catches the problem than a silent one that doesn’t.” Both are problems. The former just makes management feel like a problem would be caught be the on-call.

Management could be the most relevant part. A silent alarm is management's fault, a wrongly ignored noisy alarm can be pushed as staff's fault.

Pretty certain management have 0 control over which alarms can be disabled on the equipment. And I would bet that the equipment from other brands have the same issue.

Re: Alarms in medical equipment

#100

Post by throwaway765123 »

amelius wrote: post #95
jimmySixDOF wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

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
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