title: Representing clinical communication knowledge through database management system integration.
abstract: Clinical communication failures are considered the leading cause of medical errors [1]. The complexity of the clinical culture and the significant variance in training and education levels form a challenge to enhancing communication within the clinical team. In order to improve communication, a comprehensive understanding of the overall communication process in health care is required. In an attempt to further understand clinical communication, we conducted a thorough methodology literature review to identify strengths and limitations of previous approaches [2]. Our research proposes a new data collection method to study the clinical communication activities among Intensive Care Unit (ICU) clinical teams with a primary focus on the attending physician. In this paper, we present the first ICU communication instrument, and, we introduce the use of database management system to aid in discovering patterns and associations within our ICU communications data repository.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55414, USA. saifk@umn.edu
authors.forename: Saif
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Khairat
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Craven
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Gong
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006747:Hospital Communication Systems; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D007362:Intensive Care Units; D010348:Patient Care Team; D018511:Systems Integration; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014481:United States; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled