The University of California, San Francisco has announced a $25 million gift from electrocardiogram innovator David W. Mortara to establish a new center at its UCSF School of Nursing dedicated to "alarm fatigue" in nurses and other clinicians.

The gift, the largest to date for the school, will establish the UCSF Center for Physiologic Research and enable nursing researchers to work directly with UCSF hospitals and industry representatives to address the high error rate in hospital ECG equipment, a problem that results in millions of unnecessary alarms in hospitals every month. The new center will support research and the establishment of a large ECG database, with the aim of identifying specific predictors of adverse patient outcomes, reducing the incidence of false alarms, and improving ECG monitoring systems. The gift from Mortara also will be used to provide opportunities for physician-researchers, recruit new faculty and students, and foster interdisciplinary research with UCSF Health, which comprises UCSF Medical Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, and other  institutions.

Alarm fatigue occurs when clinicians become desensitized to frequent alarms and either ignore them or turn the equipment off. Among the numerous detrimental results are anxiety in hospital staff and patients, sleep deprivation among hospitalized patients, and missed life-threatening heart events.

A graduate of Purdue University with a PhD in physics from the University of Illinois, Mortara joined the emerging field of automated ECG interpretation in 1973 and two years later became the manager of research and development and then vice president of engineering at Marquette Electronics, a developer of hardware and software for computerized ECG. In 1982, he founded Mortara Instrument, Inc., a Milwaukee-based manufacturer of non-invasive cardiology products, which was acquired in February 2017 by Hill-Rom, Inc. Since then, Mortara has continued to refine digital electrocardiography and improve automated algorithms for ECG interpretation. He also has been involved in the establishment of numerous ECG standards and played a leadership role in various industry initiatives.

"We are very grateful to David Mortara for his tremendous contribution in creating the innovative Center for Physiologic Research in the UCSF School of Nursing," said UCSF chancellor Sam Hawgood. "The school is a national leader in the study of alarm fatigue and ECG monitoring, and this gift will significantly advance these efforts to further improve patient care, one of UCSF's primary missions."

(Photo credit: Elisabeth Fall, UCSF)