Intensive Care

The care process in Intensive Care units (ICUs) can benefit greatly from IT-support, although not primarily in the way it has been approached historically.

Automating Intensive Care

The intensive care process is characterized by patients that require relatively complex docter's orders and large numbers of interventions and diagnostics. The main issues:

eliminate the possibility of errors
improve the internal communication
improve external communication
facilitate the continuous assessment of treatment outcome and production.

Traditionally, Intensive Care automation has concentrated on the bed-side monitoring of care and the implementation of an electronic IC-list.

Analysis of the care process indicates that most errors occur not at the bed-side but away from it: docter's orders and communication with the provider of medication and diagnostics. Because of the highly complex task of reliably monitoring the bed-side care process, these traditional systems have become very complex, very expensive and do often fall short when used for outcome assessment or the generation of simple production statistics. Last but not least, these solutions have tended to concentrate on adult ICUs which severely limits their use for Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Units (PICU and NICU).

Recent developments suggest that simpler and less ambitious approaches are needed to reduce errors and to greatly increase the possibilities for outcome assessment, generating vital production statistics and even comparing the ICU performance with related ICUs.

Products:

PDMS, Transistor and CLICK

In collaboration with leading dutch university hospitals, Inspektor has developed three products that support the care process on intensive cares. Our patient data management system PDMS greatly improves the quality of care and provides an open platform for the assessment of treatment outcome and production.
Transistor was developed to give physiology its rightful place on the intensive care. Primarily it provides a ‘black box’ for the intensive care unit. It records and discards all physiological information automatically. But it can do much more. Click here for more details.

For those units that are not yet prepared to automate the care process but do want to assess treatment outcome and production, Inspektor developed CLICK, a simple and fast set of data-collection programs. In the Netherlands CLICK is used to collect treatment and production data of intensive care units for national databases that are used to evaluate and enhance the quality of IC-care.

medical main

physiology

policlinic