Integration of intermittent clinical data with continuous data from bedside monitors

Abstract

Intermittent data from hospital information systems and continuous data from beside monitors are rarely integrated. This integration is crucial to providing physicians with comprehensive views of their patients' clinical state. It also can provide a broader clinical context for intelligent monitoring programs and thereby increase the sensitivity and specificity of their alarms. We describe an implemented application programming interface (API) that provides an abstracted query interface to the hospital's central, relational database and to data extracted from the monitors. The API also provides several data-reduction operators to help manage the large volume of data generated. We describe an electronic flowsheet that was built using the API.<>