How has data management improved ICU performance?
The ICU is a highly technological environment where each patient data generates thousands of data-points per day. However, most of this data is usually wasted thus missing the opportunity of using this data to understand patient profile and improve outcomes.
For many years intensivists have used individual patient data to monitor and follow organ failure severity and trajectory with widely used scoring systems such as the SOFA score and aggregate ICU data using information on physiology and patients characteristics to generate severity of illness and prognostic scores such as the SAPS and APACHE scores that do not add to the management of individual patient but can be used to evaluate global severity of illness of a population and produce estimates of efficacy of the ICU through standardized mortality rates.
In recent years the fast development of electronic medical records, interoperability, connectivity with medical devices, cloud-based systems and streaming analytics brought advanced information with near-real-time analysis to the bedside aiding clinicians to manage patients based on data and to manage ICUs and their quality and performance using descriptive analysis, advanced prediction models and strategic benchmarking tools. Although not fully implemented, it is clear that the current technology allows point of care assessment of key performance indicators and is the cornerstone of data driven management.
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