Support for Salience: IT to Assist Burn ICU Clinician Decision Making and Communication

Clinicians need to find and use the most important, or salient, information to make optimal patient care decisions. The fragile health of patients who are admitted to a Burn Intensive Care Unit (BICU) requires clinicians and clinical teams to make time-pressured diagnostic and therapeutic decisions based on complex sets of information. Barriers to these decisions, and related behaviors, which we term "cognitive work," delay patient care and increase care cost, length of stay, and the potential for misadventures. We report on the progress of a project to develop a real time IT system to support BICU individual and team cognitive work and communication. Our approach enables clinicians to obtain salient information through three means: role-based data views, ability to personally configure displays, and data mining to reveal trends and patterns. User interface and data mining functions and are now being programmed to develop increasingly refined prototypes that we evaluate with BICU clinicians at each stage through agile software development. Evaluation will verify improvements to decision making that result from clinician use of the CCS. More efficient, reliable collaboration among members of the ICU staff who use this Cooperative Communication System (CCS) will improve patient safety and optimize patient outcomes.