INFOBIOTIKA

The use of antibiotics is a particularly complex area of medical decision-making with long-term effects on the development of resistance, treatment outcomes and costs. Therefore, there is an increasing interest in implementing clinical decision support to optimize the use of antibiotics.

Under the leadership of an ICU physician and the director of HIC, two Master theses were initiated in December 2008 and carried out to:

• gather the requirements of a system that can provide ICU physicians with a full picture of a patient´s infectious state, in order to assist in making a correct and safe antibiotic choice
• develop an integrated information model that captures the required data in this context
• apply visualisation techniques that support decision making during antibiotic treatment in intensive care
• investigate the usefulness of existing openEHR archetypes in the context of critical care antibiotic prescribing
• develop a prototype based on the visualisation and data integration efforts

The prototype was then developed further until September 2010, increasing its capabilities of providing a holistic visualisation of patient data that is integrated from various sources to support the appropriate use of antibiotics.

An exploratory usability investigation and an initial performance testing of Infobiotika by combining traditional usability testing with eye-tracking technology was performed in 2010. The aim of this usability testing was to observe end users interacting and performing some tasks with Infobiotika. Participants proposed a few improvements in the current design but considered Infobiotika to be a potentially valuable aid in supporting faster decision-making concerning antibiotic treatment options.

In October 2010, a collaboration was started with an industry partner that led to performing a study about integrating Infobiotika with a commercial electronic health record, based upon openEHR´s two-level modelling approach, i.e. using archetypes and a reference information model. A part of the results is that Infobiotika can now exchange data with various other applications since its data is represented by a standard information model and that Infobiotika can be executed from within a `real-life´ health record.

The project is performed in collaboration with ANOPIVA, Karolinska Sjukhuset, and the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, KI.

Project leader: Magnus Falkenhav, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and ANOPIVA. Johanna Forsman (PhD Student at HIC) is part of this project.