Projects in the scope of intensive care units |
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Background |
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Today, the documentation of medical data in intensive care units is often still done manually using paper and a pen. Over the course of many years, this approach has proven itself and is regarded by medical staff as efficient. The use of computers and software for documenting e. g. administered medication or nutrients, fluid balance values or life parameters is often considered to be too cumbersome and hence problematic. As another important aspect, high costs for hardware and software result in the fact that electronic means are very rarely used for documentation purposes in intensive care units. Despite these circumstances, well-adjusted software can easily help in this domain to technically support the work of medical staff, so that nurses and doctors can concentrate on more important tasks. Through a computer-aided documentation of care procedures, administered medication as well as medical reports, a lot of time can be saved which can then be used more efficiently in other aspects. |
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Project information |
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On the basis of these considerations, software tools which help intensive care unit personnel in their daily work were developed in close cooperation between the OFFIS computer science institute, the heart surgery department of the Oldenburg Clinic and Maquet Cardiopulmonary AG. Within the scope of this project, two software components have been realized: firstly, a component for transferring and integrating laboratory information, and secondly, a component for creating and managing initial prescription sheets. The software component for transferring and integrating laboratory information deals with the visualization of information from all laboratory examinations of a patient. In total, the software provides three views of the underlying laboratory data: in the examination view, all measurement values of one arbitrary laboratory examination of a patient are displayed, in the cumulative view all measurement values of all laboratory examinations of a patient are visualized and in the trend view the development of one particular examination parameter over the course of time is displayed in a diagram. The software component for creating and managing initial prescription sheets supports the medical staff of the Oldenburg Clinic's heart surgery intensive care unit in managing the administered medication for all patients and in printing out prescription sheets. On these prescription sheets, all drugs that are supposed to be administered to a patient over the course of a specific time span are listed. In detail, the software provides the following functionality:
Both software components were developed for Windows platforms using the Java programming language. As a relational database management system, an Oracle database is utilized for both componentes. The following links provide a screenshot of the laboratory information component and a screenshot of the prescription sheet component. After having finished the implementation of the laboratory information component, this software was reimplemented using the C# programming language for testing purposes, in order to be able to compare the performance of the different programming languages. The following link shows a screenshot of the laboratory information component in C#. |
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Related websites |
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Website of the OFFIS computer science institute. Homepage of the Oldenburg Clinic. Website of Maquet Cardiopulmonary AG. |
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