A Survey on Intensive Care Units Information System in Hospitals affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

The information system of the intensive care unit has been designed and established in order to manage patients’ data and quickly retrieve patients’ information in this unit. This research was carried out to study the information system of the ICU and reporting capabilities in the hospitals affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (SBMU).

In this descriptive cross-sectional study, the study population included ICU information systems in seven hospitals that had the system in place. Data gathering tools were a questionnaire and a checklist. The content validity was performed to ensure the validity of the checklist and questionnaire (based on the relevant literature and seeking experts’ opinion). The test-retest method was used to determine the questionnaire reliability (r = 0.89). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.

Data collection in the ICU information system in all hospitals understudy is done both in the form of paper forms and electronically (semi-automatically). Regarding reporting capability, different types of reports, including patients’ demographic information reports, admission reports, discharge reports, transfers, diagnoses, mortality, and management reports, none of the studied hospitals, the automatic reporting capability scores (GCS), reporting patient safety indicators through alerts and reminders, reporting the cost of medications, reporting disease severity, including Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), and Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE), were not observed.

Implementing comprehensive and integrated ICU information systems can be an ef-fective step towards organizing patient information and improving the quality of service provided to them. Therefore, the deployment of an ICU information system is necessary to improve care delivery in ICUs.