16 Sep 2026
Since 2016, the Joint Commission has required hospitals to have an alarm management strategy to maintain accreditation.i Yet many hospitals struggle to sustain a committee that consistently impacts alarm management. Colleen Bruske, Ashley Santos and Mary Silvia have seen this reality play out both in their roles as nurses and in their current clinical services roles at Philips. They recently gathered to answer some questions about challenges and strategies for alarm committees.
Ashley: Sometimes it’s driven by necessity. A serious patient safety event, new research or another significant issue forces the organization to recognize they need a more structured approach.
Other times, it’s when we demonstrate what’s possible through alarm management solutions. Organizations realize that before they can optimize alarm limits or standardize settings, they first need governance.
This is especially true for large health systems with multiple hospitals. They often discover that each site has been operating independently, using different alarm settings and workflows. An alarms committee becomes the vehicle for creating consistency across the organization.
Colleen: In many cases, it starts with the conversations we have as trusted advisors. We come into an organization, assess their current state and essentially hold up a mirror. We help them recognize where opportunities exist, what risks we’ve identified and what recommendations we have. Often, organizations know they should have an alarms committee, but they don’t know where to begin or simply haven’t had the time to strategically think about it. That’s where an experienced partner can help.
Colleen: An effective alarm committee has structure, the objectives are clear, and the issues are dealt with according to priority. The right people are at the table at the right time, and members are flexible and collaborative.
Ashley: I’d add that you need to have a way to measure success. Successful committees evaluate results, collaborate across disciplines and focus on long-term improvements in patient outcomes and staff workflows.
Mary: Many organizations start with a statement such as, “Alarms are a problem,” which is too broad to generate results. It is important to specifically define:
Without a clear problem statement, committees struggle to make meaningful progress.
Colleen: An effective committee has a mix of high-level stakeholders and bedside caregivers. On one hand, those who use the protocols that will be devised by the committee need to be part of the conversation. On the other hand, the committee’s recommendations are more likely to be employed with buy-in from key stakeholders, particularly the CNO. This structure creates a more engaged staff while leadership holds the team accountable.
Mary: I’d add that patient care technicians, telemetry technicians, IT and data analysts all have a role.
Ashley: It is really important to re-evaluate and change the committee composition as needed. This is a long-term committee, and new members bring fresh ideas.
Colleen: A physician champion can accelerate progress. Biomedical engineering is often responsible for the heavy lift of changing monitor settings for example, so they need to be included.
Ashley: I’d also include quality or risk management, who are critical in measuring outcomes and sustaining improvement, and someone from clinical education, because new protocols have to be taught to the staff.
Mary: Representatives from the night shift are also sometimes overlooked. When you consider that they are providing care when patients should be sleeping, it is counterintuitive that they aren’t more involved in strategies to decrease alarms. Night shifts also have staffing patterns, workflows and patient activity that could lead to alarm burden that may differ from day shifts.
Colleen: We’ve mentioned a lot of roles, so I’d like to add that not everyone needs to be at every meeting. Meeting attendance should be correlated to each meeting’s agenda.
Colleen: Executive sponsorship is critical. Leaders must maintain the committee’s structure, keep objectives visible, review metrics regularly, and ensure accountability. They also need to recognize when clinical priorities temporarily require attention elsewhere and adjust accordingly.
Ashley: Once the committee is established, giving the right task to the right owner makes people want to be involved. Nurses want to make a difference, so when they feel empowered, they take ownership.
When I was a bedside nurse, my hospital integrated alarm management into the nursing clinical ladder. Nurses who wanted to move up within the organization were encouraged to participate in committees, including alarm management. That resulted in committee members who wanted to improve alarm management because they experienced the problems firsthand, but who also were incentivized to be involved for professional development.
Colleen: Clinicians are overburdened, and hospitals ask a lot from them, so not every committee member has to be at every meeting. That’s the value of a good agenda. It dictates who needs to attend, and that keeps people from getting burned out, because they aren’t required to sit through meetings that don’t need their expertise.
Mary: Data can also function as an engagement tool. Support and involvement increase when organizations can quantify alarm issues, demonstrate impact and measure improvement opportunities.
Ashley: First, bring in an objective observer — whether that’s an internal resource or an experienced consultant — to evaluate current workflows.
Watch how alarms are managed in practice:
Many organizations discover there’s a significant gap between policy and reality.
Next, collect meaningful alarm data. Before making any changes, gather enough information to understand current alarm activity.
This baseline is incredibly important because helps you:
It points you in the direct of specific actions. The advantage of data collection is that it allows you to combine staff feedback with hard numbers, so that it’s not a matter of the loudest voice in the room determining priorities.
Third, have a long-term strategy. An alarms committee isn’t a one-week project. Identify and engage stakeholders who have both the expertise and the willingness to stay engaged over the next six months — or even several years — to drive meaningful change.
Colleen: The umbrella metric is alarm load. It provides visibility into the overall alarm burden and helps identify trends. Next, committees should review the most frequent alarms, alarm type distribution and recurring alarm patterns.
Also, look for easy wins. For example, one hospital I’ve worked with had many nonactionable A-fib alarms. We learned that was because they had A-fib on as a default alarm for all patients. By removing that alarm criteria from patients not at risk, we eliminated a lot of false alarms.
Ashley: Break down data by unit, rather than looking at enterprise-level averages, so you can identify localized problem areas.
Mary: This is a key stumbling block for alarm committees. On some committees, everyone contributes ideas, but no one owns implementation. Successful committees clearly assign task owners, deliverables and due dates.
Colleen: The person who is responsible for making changes, whether a CNO or physician, needs to understand the data and its impact. This is where automated alarm data collection really helps. When I worked in the hospital setting, I had to go to the central station and compile information by hand that you now can acquire easily and succinctly from tools that compile and organize alarm data.
Once the data establishes that a change in alarming parameters should be considered, I recommend starting with a pilot unit, where you can implement the change for 30-90 days and measure the metrics compared to baseline. When you hone in on a single unit, you have a place to test and tweak; it minimizes risk and generates evidence before broader implementation.
Colleen: The strength of a committee is only as strong as nursing leadership. We’re seeing a huge turnover in leadership and that weakens the committee – as does staff turnover in general. It can cause the committee to lose focus.
Luckily, the data stays behind even when staff leaves. Products like Clinical Insights Manager Data Viewer and Alarm Insights Manager are retrospective data collection engines. When leadership changes, the new leader can go back in time, and get the data they need without starting from scratch and losing momentum.
Mary: The establishment of the committee is a good beginning, but meetings are just the means, not the end. Impactful change is driven by data-informed decisions, clear ownership, meaningful action plans, and continuous measurement of improvement against an established baseline. When teams can see improvements in patient safety, care delivery, staff workflow or the healing environment, that progress creates momentum.
Whether your organization has an established alarms committee or is just getting started, Philips clinical and implementation consultants can help you move from strategy to sustained action. Our teams provide clinical and IT support to help assess current workflows, interpret alarm data, test changes, deploy solutions and manage a customized alarm management approach that supports patient safety, staff experience and long-term improvement. To learn more, reach out to your Philips representative or contact Philips Capsule at https://capsuletech.com/contact and reference creating and maintaining an effective alarms committee in the Additional Comments field. If you’d like to learn more about Alarm Insights Manager, visit capsuletech.com or watch this short video.
– Colleen Bruske, MSN, RN, and Clinical Sales Consultant for Philips Capsule.
– Ashley Santos PhD, MBA, RN, and Clinical Sales Consultant for Philips Capsule.
– Mary Silvia, MSN-HI, RN, CCRN, and Clinical Transformation Manager for Philips Hospital Patient Monitoring.
For a deep dive into alarm management and how to build an effective alarm committee, read this white paper.
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