Most Telemetry Alarms Require No Action

Cardiac telemetry monitoring is used widely to detect clinically significant arrhythmias in hospitalized patients; however, such monitoring is resource intensive and often produces nonactionable alarms. Monitor watchers (certified medical assistants with additional telemetry training) sometimes are deployed centrally to triage telemetry alerts, which enables nurses to focus on other clinical tasks. But is this a useful practice?

Researchers retrospectively studied approximately 1200 telemetry patients (not in the intensive care unit) at an urban teaching hospital during 2 months. A daily average of 66 telemetry patients generated five system alerts per patient-day (i.e., ≈1 alert every 4 minutes). Nonactionable alarms were defined as invalid…