The School of Nursing at University of California San Francisco received its largest-ever donation to support research to reduce alarm fatigue among nurses and other clinicians, and improve clinical quality and patient safety.
David Mortara, PhD, donated $25 million to the school's new Center for Physiologic Research. The funds will support research and the development of a large electrocardiogram database among hospital units. The database will be used to detect predictors of adverse patient outcomes, reduce false alarm rates and improve ECG monitoring.
"I've seen for too long that there is a vendor world of research and a separate medical world of research, and they don't cross very well," said Dr. Mortara, an industry leader in ECG technology and an associate professor of nursing at UCSF. "The long-term vision of this center is to be a bridge, an innovative center that has resources and people eager to work together to resolve alarm fatigue. Our success will not be just in what we're able to do as a center, but also in what we can get vendors to do."
After earning his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Mortara joined the field of automated ECG interpretation in 1973. In 1982, Dr. Mortara founded Mortara Instruments, a manufacturer of noninvasive cardiology equipment, which was acquired by Hill-Rom in February.
To learn more about UCSF center and Dr. Mortara, click here.
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