Picis Critical Care Manager

Automating clinical documentation in critical care

Picis Critical Care Manager, part of the CareSuite® family of high-acuity solutions, is a comprehensive critical care software system that records and supports care management throughout the entire ICU process including all specialty care areas. By providing effective automation of documentation at the point of care, Critical Care Manager is helping hospitals around the world improve quality while reducing costs.

Without an effective critical care information system, an inordinate amount of time is spent recording data, yet much of the vital information needed to make the right decisions may be unavailable or difficult to correlate. Critical Care Manager is a powerful tool that can dramatically improve the documentation process of a critical care unit.

In addition to our proven critical care information system, Picis also offers the industry's leading total perioperative information system. From the preoperative clinic through the operating room, recovery room and specialty adult or pediatric critical care unit, Picis solutions are fully integrated and allow that a patient's progress is automatically tracked and charted from one critical area to another.

Key Benefits:

• Allows nurses to spend more time on patient care 
  In a critical care unit, clinical documentation can take up a significant amount of a nurse's time. Manually recording the constant flow of information is time consuming and a source of errors. The automatic capture of physiologic parameters and streamlined bedside documentation enhances patient care. Nurses can spend more time with the patient and less time on paperwork. Furthermore, the system can save time and prevent errors by automatically performing calculations of required derived parameters and drug dosages.
• Improves decision making with data correlation
  Trends are graphically displayed giving the clinician an easy visual display of the data correlation for overview and help in decision-making. For example: Drug infusion can be trended against hemodynamic parameters and vital signs.
• Allows clinicians to identify high-risk patient populations
  Efficient identification of high risk patient populations is key to implementing effective care protocols to prevent complications and increased length of stay. For example, highly effective nosocomial infection surveillance programs typically rely on manual chart review processes directed by an infection control staff. Hospitals that implement automated data capture and reporting tools can reduce staff time devoted to surveillance by up to 50%. Furthermore, action can be taken real-time to provide a better patient outcome.
• Helps improve compliance with regulatory agency requirements
  Critical Care Manager improves charting legibility and completeness. This helps increase compliance with documentation regulatory requirements, thus decreasing exposure to liability. Take Joint Commission restraints guidelines as an example. With Critical Care Manager, you can establish a restraints protocol standard and the system will prompt for necessary documentation, as well as proactively monitor staff compliance.
  
  Also, automated prompting of required care actions can improve compliance with the hospital's standards of care. Users do not need to leave the patient to find manuals or look up standards, as the standards are built into their Critical Care Manager documentation. Changes to standards are quickly and easily added to the system and are then immediately made available to all Critical Care Manager users.
• Decreases orientation time and costs and meets Joint Commission requirements
  Staff orientation is a major expense in most ICU environments. In some cases, one-third to one-half of this orientation period is spent familiarizing nurses with hospital forms, guidelines for documentation and practice protocols. Critical Care Manager can shorten orientation time considerably. The system is easy-to-use, proactively helps ensure compliance and automatically prompts users for required documentation. This streamlines the process and provides immediate feedback for quality assurance monitoring. It also makes implementing new Joint Commission requirements faster and easier.
• Reduces documentation time
  The ability to quickly document patient information and automate calculations allows the caregiver to reduce the amount of time spent documenting, avoid calculation errors and the associated risks and spend more time on direct patient care.