NEONATE: Decision support in the neonatal intensive care unit - A preliminary report

The aim of the NEONATE project is to investigate sub-optimal decision making in the neonatal intensive care unit and to implement decision support tools which will draw the attention of nursing and clinical staff to situations where specific actions should be taken or avoided. We have collected over 400 patient-hours of data on 31 separate babies, including physiological parameters sampled every second, observations made by a research nurse of all the actions performed on the baby with an accuracy of a few seconds, occasional descriptions of the appearance, mobility, sleep patterns, etc of the baby. We describe our attempts to use this data to discover examples of sub-optimal behaviour.