[Buttons840]

There will always be false positives and false negatives, they have to be balanced.

If the cost of a actual negative is 100 and the cost of an actual positive is 1. You'd expect there to be approximately 100 times more false negatives, because we want to be 100 times more sensitive to the costly negative condition.

I'm this sense, the alarms in hospitals make sense. Actual negative are very costly.

But this is a cold mathematical analysis that doesn't consider alarm fatigue and the cost of people learning to ignore the alarm. I wonder how to best model human nature in this calculation?

An optimal solution would require considering all alarms, and modeling the fact that every alarm given is another alarm ignored (assuming the hospital is operating at capacity, if it's below capacity the solution is easy, just manually check all alarms). This system might realize that the 4th "no pulse" alarm of the night for Alice would detract from the 1st "no pulse" alarm for Bob, and that Bob's is more likely to need attention. I'd be terrified to program such a system though, and from what I've seen in corporate programming environments, I'm not confident any company could get this right.

[LorenPechtel]

You have it backwards.

They really do not want false negatives because that gets them sued. Thus the system will be set up to err on the side of false positives--the current liability climate does not blame them for alarm fatigue.

Consider a local case (although it's possible it was overturned on appeal): Yes, the doctor was unquestionably playing loose with standard safety precautions. His behavior transmitted blood-borne infections. He died in prison which was well deserved.

However, the lawyers went hunting for some deep pockets. The manufacturer of the drug involved in the cross contamination. They made various size vials, including some that were bigger than would be used on one patient. This permitted the doctor to contaminate between patients and got them hit with a $250M verdict. (Never mind that had they truly only used clean needles with them like they should have there never would have been an issue. They used a new needle but the old syringe.)

That's the sort of insane legal pressure driving the garbage.