Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Clinical Alerting System for Intensive Care Unit

Nowadays many hospitals use clinical information systems (CIS) to improve patient health care and information management. CIS retrieves and manages patient information such as patient administration, laboratory data and medications. Specialized CIS, especially Intensive Care Unit (ICU) CIS, needs to handle more additional information. How to process and make use of this enormous amount of physiologic data generated by ICU is a significant topic in CIS design. We have designed and implemented a real-time clinical alerting system for ICU, which executes alert algorithms on the database records of 63 ICU physiologic parameters. The user can create various alert rules with our rule editor to supervise the values or trends of these parameters. When an alert condition on a specific patient is detected, the system notices the clinicians in charge with mobile phones or pagers. With this functionality, up-to-date patient information is provided for clinicians’ use in judging the patient’s condition and making treatment decisions