Staff Acceptance of Remote Patient Monitoring on Intensive Care Unit

In intensive care medicine, patient monitoring has become a standard that has led to a significant improvement in patient safety in recent decades. At the international level, minimum requirements for patient monitoring have been set out in guidelines and recommendations that represent milestones in patient safety, such as the Helsinki Declaration for Anaesthesiology and the Vienna Declaration for Intensive Care. With advances in digital health, there are new options for patient monitoring that may improve patient safety.

The concept of the Internet of Things has recently gained in importance. While the personal computer (PC) was long regarded as a prerequisite for making technologies accessible to people, the use of computer-supported electronic infrastructures has become ubiquitous. Today, more and more everyday devices are equipped with electronic circuits (microchip, memory chip), blurring earlier boundaries between hardware and software. In an intensive care unit - an environment with high operational reliability - ubiquitous computing means that the processing and visualization of medical data must not be limited to typical workstations at the patient's bedside. Instead, the accessibility of data relevant to medical decisions should result from clinical workflows, leading to the targeted provision of information as needed.

Although various remote patient monitoring systems from commercial providers are already available, little is known about how they can effectively support clinical processes. At the Charité, the working group "Data Science in Perioperative Care" of the Clinic for Anaesthesiology with focus on operative intensive care Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Virchow and Campus Mitte is systematically evaluating the integration of such novel technologies with special consideration of the socio-technical dimension.

In the pre-implementation phase, 15 ICU staff members (physicians, nurses and respiratory therapists) will be involved into a semi-structured interview study. Results from this pre-implementation study will be validated via two independent surveys involving ICU staff members (n>100). In the post-implementation phase, two semi-structured interview studies will be conducted with key stakeholders of the ICU until data saturation is reached (n=5-10). The focus of this post-implementation interview studies will be to analyse the usability of the installed remote patient monitoring system as well as the success of the implementation and its contributing factors.

Inclusion criteria

From the Department for Anaesthesiology and operative Intensive Care, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Virchow- Klinikum and Campus Charité Mitte, Germany

• physicians
• specialist nurses
• respiratory therapists or respiratory therapists

Exclusion criteria

• Rejection of participation