While the healthcare industry has certainly made strides in the last five decades, the intensive care unit has been repeatedly overlooked. Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, a patient safety expert and physician at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Hospital, told STAT recently the ICU is "no different than it was 50 years ago."
In fact, a review in Critical Care cited by STAT found there have been no major advances in ICU care since the 1960s, when the field came into being.
Now, however, Dr. Pronovost and other experts are working to bring critical care into the present day. Dr. Pronovost dubbed his mission as creating a "smart ICU."
Below are five ways hospitals and experts are working to make advancements in ICUs to ultimately improve care and keep patients safe, pulled from the STAT report.
1. Often, patients in the ICU should have their beds raised to a certain angle to prevent pneumonia, but clinicians are measuring the elevation with paper protractors. Dr. Pronovost has the vision for an inexpensive sensor that could monitor elevation continuously.
2. Clinicians in the ICU are inundated with data on multiple patients from multiple machines, and usually don't have an efficient way to organize it and keep it straight. Dr. Brian Pickering, an anesthesiologist and critical care physician at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, and colleagues took matters into their own hands and developed AWARE, an "electronic intern" that takes data from various machines, identifies the most important information and highlights it for physicians.
Another similar tool is EMERGE, developed at Johns Hopkins. It takes data from EMRs and can warn clinicians if a planned treatment could cause harm to a patient.
3. To improve handoffs and clinician communication, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston implemented a secure microblogging program, accessible by all ICU care team members, where they share information on all patients.
4. When ICU patients are covered in tubes and wires, it can be hard for clinicians to see them as people. UCSF in San Francisco combats this problem with bedside tablets that allow patients or family members to upload photos and information on the patient, which can help clinicians feel more connected to their patients.
5. Currently, most devices used in the ICU don't easily share data with one another. Joe Kiani, founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, is working to change that by getting manufacturers to sign a pledge that their devices will be interoperable with others.