Electronic medical record in the intensive care unit.

The EMR in the ICU has the utility of providing the necessary information to make sound clinical decisions for critically ill patients. For it to be optimized, the EMR must be more than just what is being replicated in the written record or merely a documentation tool; it must add value that supports and enhances clinical decision support. The EMR is too expensive a tool just to be a computer designed to ease documentation and retrieve data faster. Gardner and Huff have suggested that the EMR must answer three questions: Why, What, and So What. The "Why" is relatively easy to answer, but the "What" data to use so that the information is meaningful to a provider and the "So What" are more difficult to answer. Provided one can qualitatively assess "What" information is important for a health care provider, then "So What" becomes an important objective in the empirical quantification of the benefits that the EMR provides. It is clear that to analyze some of the outcomes that health care delivery provides, one needs some mechanism to automate the information at the point of care, particularly now that the regulatory agencies are requiring it. Given the fact that there is no single integrated computerized patient record, this becomes the daunting task for the next century. Making it easier for health care providers to interact with the system and providing them with instantaneous feedback that changes their medical decision so they can deliver better care (clinical pathways, clinical practice guidelines) will be the task required of the next generation of CISs.