Applying safety goals to a new intensive care workstation system

Abstract

In hospitals today, there is a trend towards the integration of different devices. Clinical workflow demands are growing for the integration of formally independent devices such as ventilator systems and patient monitoring systems. On one hand, this optimizes workflow and reduces training costs. On the other hand, testing complexity and effort required to ensure safety increase. This in turn gives rise to new challenges in the design of such systems. System designers must change their mindset because they are now designing a set of distributed systems instead of a single system which is only connected to a central monitoring system. In addition, the complexity of such workstation systems is much higher than that of individual devices. This paper presents a case-study on an intensive care workstation. To cope with this complexity, different use-cases have been devised and a set of safety goals have been defined for each use-case. The influence of the environment on the use-cases is highlighted and some measures to ensure data integrity within the workstation system are shown. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.