Critical Care Nursing

● An area of expertise within nursing that focuses specifically with human responses to life-threatening problems.

Critical Care Nurse

● Is responsible to ensure that critically ill patients are seriously conditioned individuals.
● Ensure that families of the medically ill patients should receive optimal care.
● Rely upon a dedicated knowledge, skills and experience and of course automated system of support and
intelligent system to provide care to patients and families and create environments that are healing,
compassionate and caring.

Critical Care Applications

● Areas where patients require complex assessment, high-intensity medication, continuous therapy and
interventions, and unrelenting nursing attention and continuous watchfulness.
● Intensive care units, Pediatric Intensive Care Units, Neonatal Intensive Care Units, Cardiac Catheter Labs,
Telemetry Units, Progressive Care Units, Emergency Departments and recovery rooms are among the special
area of critical care application that need immediate attention when it comes to proper automation and
computerization.
● Critical care providers and nurses rely upon a dedicated knowledge, skills and experience and automated system
of support and intelligent system to provide care to patients and families and create environments that are
healing, compassionate and caring.
● Technology contributes to the healthcare areas, making it easier for patients to recover, and keeps proper
management of health.

Critical Care Information System

● Provide real-time resource utilization data and management of information and access critical care areas through
the integration of the medical facilities in the critical care or intensive care unit to an intelligent computer system
which is capable of processing all data.
● Enables the electronic collection of hospital and patient-specific critical care data of the entire patient in the critical
care areas which can be processed to create a patient profile which generates real time and historical report on
indicators including bed occupancy, delayed discharges, readmission rates, and outcomes.
● Automated collection and management of medical information will become the important task of the critical care
information system.
● The hospitals in the Philippines with critical care information system should have a large clinical computer system
that uses information from many different areas such as information from the clinical laboratory, pharmacy,
radiology, pulmonary, cardiology, bedside nurse charting, and other areas are all combined and correlated to
provide reporting, feedback and suggestions to hospital staff.
● Special software is installed in the computer system which enables the user to have an access and use of the
critical care information system.
● The bedside monitoring system acquires data such as heart rate from the ECG, parameters from arterial and
pulmonary arterial invasive blood pressures, temperatures, non-invasive blood pressures and arterial saturation
and heart rate from pulse oximetry.
● Other electronic devices at the patient’s bedside such as infusion pumps, mechanical ventilators, mixed venous
oxygen saturation monitors, and fluid collection devices that measure chest drainage and urine output are also
sources of important clinical information.
● Information from these devices, many of which are microprocessor based, is typically manually entered by nurses
and critical care staff at the terminal located at each patient’s bedside.
● The manual and automatic information collected is used for complete computerized charting and for computerized
decision making.
● As such, the critical care information system has built-in statistical information which prepares all the charting and
statistical analysis and reporting systems.

Medical Information Bus (MIB)

● Provides a generalized method of attaching patient monitoring
devices to a common interface.
● This interface converts the unique manufacturer data
communications protocol into a standardized hardware and
software system.
 ● It eliminates the need for a custom connector and software presently needed to interface such devices.
● It has the ability to filter, store and select information sent for inclusion into the clinical medical record on the
clinical computer system. Infusion pumps, ventilators, pulse, and other patient equipment are now transmitting
clinical information for use in clinical data reporting and decision making.

Advantages of Critical Care Information System

✔ Intelligently integrates and process physiologic and diagnostic information and store it to a secured
clinical repository
✔ Creates trends analysis with graphical representation of results
✔ Offline simulation can be performed to test the condition of the patients
✔ Provide clinical decision support system
✔ Provide access to vital patient information
✔ Providing feedback and quick evaluation of the patient's condition and providing alert.