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Classification of clinical alarms is at the heart of prioritization, suppression, integration, postponement, and other methods of mitigating alarm fatigue. Since these methods directly affect clinical care, alarm classifiers, such as intelligent suppression systems, need to be evaluated in terms of their sensitivity and specificity, which is typically calculated on a labeled dataset of alarms. Unfortunately, the collection and particularly labeling of such datasets requires substantial effort and time, thus deterring hospitals from investigating mitigations of alarm fatigue. This article develops a lightweight method for evaluating alarm classifiers without perfect alarm labels. The method relies on probabilistic labels obtained from data programming—a labeling paradigm based on combining noisy and cheap-to-obtain labeling heuristics. Based on these labels, the method produces confidence bounds for the sensitivity/specificity values from a hypothetical evaluation with manual labeling. Our experiments on five alarm datasets collected at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia show that the proposed method provides accurate bounds on the classifier’s sensitivity/specificity, appropriately reflecting the uncertainty from noisy labeling and limited sample sizes. 

False alarms generated by physiological monitors can overwhelm clinical caretakers with a variety of alarms. The resulting alarm fatigue can be mitigated with alarm suppression. Before being deployed, such suppression mechanisms need to be evaluated through a costly observational study, which would determine and label the truly suppressible alarms. This paper proposes a lightweight method for evaluating alarm suppression without access to the true alarm labels. The method is based on the data programming paradigm, which combines noisy and cheap-to-obtain labeling heuristics into probabilistic labels. Based on these labels, the method estimates the sensitivity/specificity of a suppression mechanism and describes the likely outcomes of an observational study in the form of confidence bounds. We evaluate the proposed method in a case study of low SpO2 alarms using a dataset collected at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and show that our method provides tight and accurate bounds that significantly outperform the naive comparative method.