Validation of Surgical Intensive Care–Infection Registry: A Medical Informatics System for Intensive Care Unit Research, Quality of Care Improvement, and Daily Patient Care

Abstract

We developed a prototype electronic clinical information system called the Surgical Intensive Care-Infection Registry (SIC-IR) to prospectively study infectious complications and monitor quality of care improvement programs in the surgical and trauma intensive care unit. The objective of this study was to validate SIC-IR as a successful health information technology with an accurate clinical data repository. Using the DeLone and McLean Model of Information Systems Success as a framework, we evaluated SIC-IR in a 3-month prospective crossover study of physician use in one of our two surgical and trauma intensive care units (SIC-IR unit versus non SIC-IR unit). Three simultaneous research methodologies were used: a user survey study, a pair of time-motion studies, and an accuracy study of SIC-IR's clinical data repository. The SIC-IR user survey results were positive for system reliability, graphic user interface, efficiency, and overall benefit to patient care. There was a significant decrease in prerounding time of nearly 4 minutes per patient on the SIC-IR unit compared with the non SIC-IR unit. The SIC-IR documentation and data archiving was accurate 74% to 100% of the time depending on the data entry method used. This accuracy was significantly improved compared with normal hand-written documentation on the non SIC-IR unit. SIC-IR proved to be a useful application both at individual user and organizational levels and will serve as an accurate tool to conduct prospective research and monitor quality of care improvement programs.