Support for information management in critical care: a new approach to identify needs

Managing information is necessary to support clinical decision making and action in critical care. By understanding the nature of information management and its relationship to sound clinical practice, we should come to use technology more wisely. We demonstrated that a new approach inspired by ethnographic research methods could identify useful and unexpected findings about clinical information management. In this approach, a clinician experienced in a specific domain (critical care), with advice from a medical anthropologist, made short-term observations of information management in that domain. We identified 8 areas in a critical care Unit in which information management was seriously in need of better support. We also found interesting differences in how these needs were viewed by nurses and physicians. Our interest in this approach was at two levels: 1. Identify and describe representative instances of sub-optimal information management in a critical care Unit. 2. Investigate the effectiveness of such short-term observations by clinicians. Our long-range goal is to explore the use of this approach and the information it reveals to optimize the process of developing and selecting new information support tools, preparing for their introduction, and optimizing clinical outcomes.