In no other care area do patients need such dedicated surveillance, care and treatment than in intensive care units (ICUs). Medical staff working in this care environment have to fulfil special requirements in order to be prepared for all eventualities. Only one error can make a big difference to patient outcome.
At this year’s Medica congress GE Healthcare is presenting a new solution for information management in ICU departments, the Centricity Clinical Notification System (CNS). CNS allows the definition of conditions based on any combination of relevant patient data. Whenever verified over a specified time it will produce a notification to the caring clinician. The conditions of notifications can be related to clinical events, protocols or data completeness; e.g. if a patient’s blood hemoglobin level is out of the user’s set goal, if a laboratory result is available, pending or missing, or if compliance guidelines are not adhered to.
“The purpose of this technological breakthrough is to help clinicians when evaluating the patient’s health condition by automatically searching available data from the Centricity database. CNS then compares the results to user defined rules and identifies potentially relevant clinical events by bringing them to the user’s attention,” said Nicolai Mokros, general manager at GE Healthcare IT for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Accordingly, ICU staff can check the clinical significance of the notification and follow up on eventually required actions before the situation becomes critical for the patient.