Patients’ Admissions in Intensive Care Units: A Clustering Overview

Intensive care is a critical area of medicine having a multidisciplinary nature requiring all types of healthcare professionals. Given the critical environment of intensive care units (ICUs), the need to use information technologies, like decision support systems, to improve healthcare services and...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ana Ribeiro, Filipe Portela, Manuel Santos, António Abelha, José Machado, Fernando Rua
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2017-02-01
Series:Information
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/8/1/23
Description
Summary:Intensive care is a critical area of medicine having a multidisciplinary nature requiring all types of healthcare professionals. Given the critical environment of intensive care units (ICUs), the need to use information technologies, like decision support systems, to improve healthcare services and ICU management is evident. It is proven that unplanned and prolonged admission to the ICU is not only prejudicial to a patient's health, but also such a situation implies a readjustment of ICU resources, including beds, doctors, nurses, financial resources, among others. By discovering the common characteristics of the admitted patients, it is possible to improve these outcomes. In this study clustering techniques were applied to data collected from admitted patients in an intensive care unit. The best results presented a silhouette of 1, with a distance to centroids of 6.2 × 10−17 and a Davies–Bouldin index of −0.652.
ISSN:2078-2489