Definition of a Critical Care Program Admission

This page defines what would be a profile (aka "record") in the Critical Care program portion of the database (see also Definition of a Medicine Program Admission). There are some differences in CC and Med collection, see ICU Curriculum/Medicine Curriculum.

A Critical Care profile constitutes all care under a given ICU service team. Thus when a patient changes service, a new record is begun. If a patient moves locations, but remains on the same ICU service, no new record is begun.

It is relevant for Using Cognos2 to keep track of patients general data use.

• The GENERAL RULE is that a patient becomes a Critical Care Laptop patient at the date/time that the ICU team takes over being their primary care team -- regardless of their physical location, even if it is a Boarding Loc such as ED or PACU. Thus, this relates to the first relevant Service tmp entry.
  • We define the ICU takes over being their primary care team as occurring when there is clear indication (usually a progress note) to this effect. That note may be by the ward team or by the ICU team.
• Each critical care service that a patient is admitted to will have a separate profile. For HSC, this means HSC_MICU, HSC_SICU, and HSC_IICU admissions will all be collected as separate profiles. The same rule applies to St Boniface for ICMS, ACCU, and ICCS admissions. Grace only has one critical care service so this is not relevant there.
  • The profiles are by service, not by location. So for example, if an MICU patient is transferred to SICU for bed management reasons and remains under the MICU service, this remains one profile and is not divided into two. Conversely, if an MICU patient is accepted by the SICU service and transfers to SICU, this stay would be separated into two profiles by service.
• There are a small number of tricky situations (not really exceptions) for this general rule:
  1. HSC_SICU: As SICU patients remain under the primary care of the surgical service (technically, the SICU team is a consulting service even though much of the daily ICU care is guided by the SICU team), the general rule is modified such that the patient becomes a Critical Care Laptop patient at the date/time that the SICU team agrees to take over care of the patient (in SICU or equivalent SICU boarding location such as ER or PACU). This is thus a "partial exception" in that the only difference with the general rule is that the ICU team isn't officially the primary care team of SICU patients.
  2. Some Cardiac Surgery patients (STB CICU) are tricky in regards to this, even though as per the general rule, the patient becomes a Critical Care laptop patient at the date/time when he/she transitions to be under the care of the CICU team. The tricky issue here is related to the fact that there are cardiac surgeons who are CICU attendings, cardiac surgery ward attendings, and operating surgeons guiding care in PACU. Thus it can sometimes be tricky to figure out which cardiac surgery service is caring for the patient before they actually arrive in STB CICU (or equivalent boarding location).
  3. Pts in ICU for procedures only who are never actually under the ICU service: These patients are, by definition, not ICU patients, and clearly DO fall under the general rule. But they may be tricky if it is not recognized that they were never under the care of the ICU team.

From Code Blue / Respiratory arrest

• The ICU team does not take over main/overall care of a patient DURING a code on the ward. When the ICU team runs a ward code, they are just performing a procedure (ACLS) for the ward team. We only consider the ICU team as taking over care IF once the patient has survived the code (or possibly in between arrests), the ICU team has agreed to do so. So, this is not automatic. The main way this will be noted is that the Medicine ward resident will almost certainly write a note indicating this.

Patients accepted to ICU service who never physically arrived in an ICU Boarding Loc

As per Bojan for those that are ECIP: If the patient was to be admitted to initial site ICU but there was a lack of bed capacity then I would consider that an admission that then was transferred however if there was no intention to admit to site unit because patient needed services at another site ICU then I would not consider them an admit

Dates of service vs location starts

See Admit DtTm for how the starting time of a record is encoded.

End of a database profile

Bed holds

To see when a profile should continue vs new profile, see Bed holds.

Definitions relevant for historical data

Definitions over time are available at

• Special:History/Definition of a Critical Care Program Admission

We need to extract a summary of the definition details from the page history. We should set up a Data Meaning Layer to provide a clear Record definition in CFE to treat historical, pre PatientFollow Project, records in a way that is consistent with our current definition.

• SMW

• Cargo

• Categories