Multimodality monitoring: informatics, integration data display and analysis.

Area of Science:

• Clinical Informatics
• Neuromonitoring
• Intensive Care Medicine

Background:

• Multimodality neuromonitoring aims to continuously assess brain physiology to prevent secondary brain injury.
• Clinical informatics focuses on the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and application of biomedical data for clinical decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review the use of informatics in intensive care units (ICUs) for multimodality neuromonitoring.
• To identify essential informatics infrastructure for effective patient data analysis and management.

Main Methods:

• An electronic literature search was performed for English articles from January 1990 to August 2013.
• Sixty-four studies describing informatics applications in the ICU setting were included in the review.

Main Results:

• An informatics infrastructure supporting diverse analytical methods (linear and nonlinear) is crucial for patient data.
• Reviewable time epochs, alarm fatigue mitigation strategies, and ergonomic data displays enhance clinical decision-making.
• High-resolution physiologic and phenotypic data archiving in an open format data warehouse is vital for translational research.

Conclusions:

• Adopting a robust clinical informatics infrastructure is essential for advancing multimodality neuromonitoring.
• This infrastructure facilitates improved patient data management, analysis, and clinical decision-making.
• The required infrastructure overlaps with that for telemedicine in ICUs, potentially improving care quality and reducing costs.