Hacker News Reader

Comment by rscho | Hacker News Reader

With such a false positive rate, I expect the staff on site to find ways to negate the effect pretty quickly.

I don't know...If every 3rd time I was alerted it was some relatively serious issue, vs how often there is a serious issue when just doing rounds that you stumble upon, I'd think that would be a pretty good alert rate compared to the norm. But then again, I'm not in healthcare.

Essentially, it depends on workplace integration, i.e. how much effort it takes to discover the alert trigger. From personal experience, I'd say the upper limit of inconvenience is 'click the alert' on mobile, and 'move mouse on alert label to see tooltip' on desktop. Anything more will be quickly discarded, especially if it involves a popup or opens a new window.

2 in 3 isn't such a terrible false positive rate.

If your home alarm caught one real burglar per each three occassions it triggered, I bet you wouldn't develop alarm fatigue. I certainly wouldn't.

Do you get burglars multiple times a day? I bet not...

Yeah, but potential death of a patient is on a similar level of seriousness.

Most of those alarms will warn about trivial everyday results, that may (with rather low probability) cause death down the line. My bet is they'd get mostly ignored very quickly.

While alarm fatigue is a real thing, the finding from this study is that they didn't, which is what matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com