Authors:
Christina-Athanasia Alexandropoulou
;
Ilias Panagiotopoulos
and
George Dimitrakopoulos
Affiliation:
Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University, Athens, Greece
Keyword(s):
Criticalities, Integrated Health Monitoring, Health Information Technology, Intensive Care Units.
Abstract:
Although today’s advanced biomedical technology provides unsurpassed power in diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment, interpretation of vast streams of information generated by this technology often poses excessive demands on the cognitive skills of health-care personnel (nurses, doctors, etc). In addition, storage, reduction, retrieval, processing, and presentation of information are significant challenges. These problems are most severe in critical care environments such as Intensive Care Units (ICUs) where many events are life-threatening and thus require immediate attention and the implementation of definitive corrective actions. As such, the modern ICU environment provides fertile soil for the development of more accurate predictive models, better decision support tools, and greater personalization of care. In this respect, the use of Health Information Technology (HIT) and clinical informatics can rapidly analyse many variables to predict outcomes of interest and face heavy uncer
tainties whose solution may require computing intensive tasks. Therefore, the development of HIT-enabled specific applications or services to alleviate common information management problems encountered in ICU environments is of fundamental importance. This paper discusses the mixed-criticality characteristics of HIT-based systems in ICU environments, as a first requirement to effectively manage them. To do so, the present study describes one principal use case, namely the Integrated Intensive Care Clinical Information System (I-ICCIS), which stems from the combination of health information technologies with classic health care practices in ICU environments. The main criticalities anticipated in such a system are described, whereas open areas for future research activities are also identified.
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