Critical care unit data integration and clinical information system

Abstract

The lack of communication between today's hi-tech bedside ICU monitors generates an abundance of raw data without yielding much useful information on the physiologic state of a patient. The time consuming integration and evaluation of raw parameters highly depends on the knowledge, skills and diligence of the clinician; however, due to human limitations, an error of ignoring significant information from large volumes of raw data could still occur. This may delay in diagnosis resulting in expensive corrective therapy. In this thesis a personal computer based software system is developed which monitors, integrates and displays all the necessary raw parameters from multiple sources and presents a physiologic profile of an organ's functional status. The system calculates secondary or derived parameters from large quantities of primary or raw parameters and unfolds the patient's physiologic state in different pictorial formats. The system quickly provides qualitative information-nation such as deviations from the therapeutic goal, instead of overloading the clinician with data. Such a cost effective and user friendly system is of great value for monitoring patients with cardiodynamic, pulmonary or respiratory problems. Also, another objective of evaluating the relationship between laboratory and clinical oxygenation calculations is achieved through statistical analysis. The results suggest that there exists a positive linear unity relationship between laboratory and clinical oxygenation calculations