{"id":272,"date":"2016-09-07T16:42:40","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T16:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a3.caaat.pro\/?p=272"},"modified":"2022-02-03T15:12:33","modified_gmt":"2022-02-03T15:12:33","slug":"raising-an-alarm-doctors-fight-to-yank-hospital-icus-into-the-modern-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ambientclinical.com\/2016\/09\/07\/raising-an-alarm-doctors-fight-to-yank-hospital-icus-into-the-modern-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising an alarm, doctors fight to yank hospital ICUs into the modern era"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he first thing you notice are the alarms.<\/p>\n

Walk into the intensive care unit in just about any American hospital, and you\u2019ll be bombarded with beeping and blaring noises and flashing lights. It may look high tech. It\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cno different than it was 50 years ago,\u201d said Dr. Peter Pronovost, a critical care physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. \u201cThere are stacks and stacks of machines with wires sticking out of them. It\u2019s chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

ICUs are one of the most crucial departments of any hospital \u2014 heroic places with devoted staff who pull the sickest of patients from death. But\u00a0many ICU physicians say they\u2019re also woefully \u2014 and often dangerously \u2014 out of date<\/a>.\u00a0Six million patients in the United States pass through ICUs each year, and studies show<\/a> serious and sometimes fatal medical errors<\/a> are routine.\u00a0And a recent review<\/a> published in the journal Critical Care found\u00a0no major advances in ICU care since the field\u2019s inception in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Now, a handful of doctors and nurses in places like Baltimore, Boston, and San Francisco are trying to yank the ICU into the 21st century.<\/p>\n

Pronovost, for instance, has called in submarine engineers and the physicists who built the spacecraft that whizzed past Pluto last year to help redesign intensive care. They\u2019ve been shocked at how primitive even new ICU units can be: \u201cThey walk through the ICU and just flinch,\u201d Pronovost said.<\/p>\n

One of the most pressing problems: None of the medical devices so critical to patient care \u2014 ventilators, pumps, drug infusers, pulse rate monitors \u2014 talk to each other, and, in what\u2019s dubbed \u201cthe alarms race,\u201d all try to outdo each other by beeping ever louder. Nurses answer a false alarm on average every 90 seconds, he said.<\/p>\n