I still remember to this day what it felt like to be a young doctor working in a hospital in a small Canadian city. There I was, fresh out of medical school, tasked with everything from monitoring critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) to delivering babies overnight and then back to the general ward attending to post-operative patients. I wanted to experience and learn it all. But nothing could have prepared me for the constant stress and overwhelming number of decisions we had to make every day, based on thousands of data points collected from monitors, ventilators, intravenous pumps, and other devices – not to mention lab results, imaging data, and various notes about the patient history.
Each morning, we would gather in a huddle of specialists and nurses for a summary briefing, going over all the patients’ data from the night before to construct patient stories that would guide our next actions. Because we typically only had one hour to discuss dozens of patients, there was no room for long expositions. We needed concise interpretations of the most critical information. Often, that meant having to condense a vast array of overnight data points into 3 short sentences – relying on each specialist to render their interpretation. The right specialist was not always available, which meant we had to revisit the same information later in the day. While we were attending to one patient, another patient’s health would sometimes unexpectedly take a turn for the worse, calling for a rapid response. We all made it work together as a team – but at the end of a shift, I couldn’t help wondering if we would have made different decisions if we had had more time and resources. I was constantly second-guessing myself.
Times have changed. A lot of the information we used to capture on paper is now stored digitally, in the electronic medical record (EMR). But in many ways, working in critical care has only gotten more challenging. Staff shortages have intensified [1], especially in rural areas [2], while the number of critically ill patients keeps rising as populations continue to age [3]. Information overload is also mounting, with an adult patient in critical care now generating up to 2 GB of high-fidelity data per day [4]. It is creating a perfect storm of challenges, with critical care providers having to attend to more patients and more data with fewer resources and less time. What’s more, clinicians are telling me that patient family members – especially younger ones who have grown up in an era of instant access to information – expect more real-time updates about their loved ones, adding further pressure on care teams.
How, then, do we keep critical care sustainable and accessible for everyone in the face of increasing demand? Adding more doctors or nurses is no longer a realistic option in most places. What is needed are new and scalable technologies that can streamline workflows and empower frontline staff to offer the same level of high-quality care across locations, more confidently and more efficiently.
I believe there are three elements to this that build on each other – all of which revolve around how we can use real-time data insights to create live, digital patient stories that support care teams in making proactive, informed decisions. Let me explain:
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