Editorial: Global excellence in intensive care medicine and anesthesiology: North America
Mariam ElSaban, Rahul Kashyap · Frontiers in Medicine · 2022
The hospital discharge papers do not mean the end of a patient's journey with a critical illness. Ahmed et al. set out to explore patient-centered outcomes in electronic medical records 48 following critical illness in the elderly population. This pilot study showed that "free text" in the 49 EHR contains essential data that give insight into patients' lives after recovering from critical 50 illness. They show that the majority of the studied charts (86%) had enough information to paint 51 a picture of the patient's health state pre and post-ICU admission. These promising findings will 52 pave the path to conducting larger-scale studies to define important patient-centered outcomes 53 and establish ways to extract them from EMR (4, 5). The goal is for these outcomes to be used in 54 critical care research to complement traditional outcomes like mortality rates. Data mining 55 presents a functional tool to use in this endeavor (6). 56In summary, the research series "Global excellence in intensive care medicine and 57 anesthesiology: North America" reflects on relevant contemporary questions and seeks 58 innovative solutions to improve patient outcomes. Future volumes of the series will continue to 59 highlight topics of interest in critical care and anesthesiology communities.