The ICU can be an extremely stressful and intimidating environment for both patients, family members and clinicians.

With the development of medical technologies, increasing clinical alarms from diverse medical devices around the patient’s bedsides are becoming a real issue in the intensive care unit (ICU)^[1]. Some of these alarms are neither clinically nor technically actionable with increasing frequency rates as high as 80% - 99% and with up to 350 alarms per bed per day^[1][2][3].

At Getinge we are constantly looking at how we can help improve the environment and workflows within the patient care landscapes. In recent years we have partnered with other leading industry partners to work collaboratively with standardization organizations to find solutions that improve the challenging situation concerning alarms in the ICU.

In the Quiet ICU concept we are focusing on distributing and managing the audial alarm from the patient bedside to the relevant clinician, while the medical equipment remains silent. This Quiet ICU concept is described in the Interoperability Showcase video “Trauma Recovery in the Quiet ICU” available at the website of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Distributing alarms from the patient bedside to the right health care provider at the right time and still maintain patient safety should help improve efficiency and create a less stressful and more healing.