Trends in technology and the future intensive care unit.

As advanced as today's critical care units are, changes in networks, computing platforms, instrumentation, human-machine interfaces, and software infrastructures and work being done in interoperability, process automation, and decision support all promise to alter both the structure and the operation of future critical unit settings. Although, as Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," we can gain of a sense of the possibilities by studying emerging trends in each of these information technology-related areas. After describing notional physical and functional architectures for today's critical care units, this article provides a high-level overview of a number of trends in the areas listed above and provides the reader with starting points for further study. Although each of these trends may be fairly unremarkable when taken in isolation, when considered as a whole, the implications for critical care are profound. To that end, a final section of the article speculates on specific ways that these trends are likely to play themselves out in the context of tomorrow's critical care environments.