Alarm management in provisional COVID-19 intensive care units: a retrospective analysis and recommendations for future pandemics

The clinical audit logs were manually collected from the patient monitoring system of four intensive care units (ICU) from a large German hospital via USB stick from the central patient monitoring device. The data consists of the time, bed number, alarm type (i.e., parameter, device, alarm criticality) and alarm handling (e.g., threshold adjustments, use of the pause function). No actual patient identifying data elements were collected. For further deidentification, dates were shifted into the future by a pseudo-random offset for all patients; the bed number was replaced by a pseudonym. Day and night rhythm, weekends, the season and the bed characteristic (double room, single room) were not affected by this process.