Information Technology in Critical Care: Review of Monitoring and Data Acquisition Systems for Patient Care and Research

• Published in: TheScientificWorld Vol. 2015; no. 2015; pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Loparo, Kenneth A., Jacono, Frank J., Kaffashi, Farhad, De Georgia, Michael A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cairo, Egypt Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2015; John Wiley & Sons, Inc; Wiley
• Subjects: Algorithms; Automation; Care and treatment; Clinical outcomes; Computers; Critical Care - methods; Data acquisition; Data entry; Data processing; Decision making; Hospitals; Humans; Information management; Information technology; Intensive care; Medical equipment; Medical Informatics - methods; Medical Informatics - trends; Medical records; Medical research; Medicine, Experimental; Monitoring, Physiologic - instrumentation; Monitoring, Physiologic - methods; Patients; Physiology; Review; Software; Systems Integration; Technology application; Cleveland Ohio; United States > US
• ISSN: 2356-6140; 1537-744X; 1537-744X
• DOI: 10.1155/2015/727694

There is a broad consensus that 21st century health care will require intensive use of information technology to acquire and analyze data and then manage and disseminate information extracted from the data. No area is more data intensive than the intensive care unit. While there have been major improvements in intensive care monitoring, the medical industry, for the most part, has not incorporated many of the advances in computer science, biomedical engineering, signal processing, and mathematics that many other industries have embraced. Acquiring, synchronizing, integrating, and analyzing patient data remain frustratingly difficult because of incompatibilities among monitoring equipment, proprietary limitations from industry, and the absence of standard data formatting. In this paper, we will review the history of computers in the intensive care unit along with commonly used monitoring and data acquisition systems, both those commercially available and those being developed for research purposes.