Somewhere between 85 and 99 percent of the alarms that sound in a hospital need no clinical intervention. The Joint Commission, citing studies of hospital monitors, put it that way in 2013, and within a year alarm safety was a national patient-safety goal for American hospitals. Staff stop hearing alarms that are almost always nothing. Occasionally one is not nothing.
Hospitals did not answer that by hiring a genius to listen to every monitor. They answered it with protocol: deciding which alarms matter, and who does what about each. It is how hospitals answer everything. Triage first, specialists by referral, a chart everyone writes on, handovers in a fixed shape, and nothing done to a patient without a signature.
Plants have the same problem, and are being offered the genius. The process industries’ alarm standard, ISA-18.2, puts the most an operator can manage at about twelve alarms an hour, and calls ten in ten minutes a flood. Much of the AI arriving on plant floors this year is an assistant: one model that knows everything and answers anything, if someone thinks to ask it.
The full piece is the thinking behind Factory Floor: the hospital’s routines, one by one, as agents running over an event mesh, and why none of them can touch a machine.