Intelligent decision support in Intensive Care : towards technology acceptance

Abstract

Decision support technology acceptance is a critical factor in the success of the adoption this type of systems by the users. INTCARE is an intelligent decision support system for intensive care medicine. The main purpose of this system is to help the doctors and nurses making decisions more proactively based on the prediction of the organ failure and the outcome of the patients. To assure the adoption of INTCARE by the doctors and by the nurses, several requirements had taken into account: process dematerialization (information is now in electronic format); interoperability among the systems (the AIDA platform was used to interoperate with other information systems); on-line data acquisition and real-time processing (a set of software agents has been developed to accomplish these tasks). A technology acceptance methodology has been followed in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of Centro Hospitalar do Porto in order to assure the most perfect alignment between the functional and technical characteristics of INTCARE and the user expectations. Results showed that the ICU staff is permeable to the system. In general more than 90 % of the answers are scored with 4 or 5 points which gives a good motivation to continue the work.