[Article] Patient Safety Beyond the Hospital: How to Structure Incident Management in Outpatient and Non-Hospital Healthcare Settings
Patient safety is no longer a challenge restricted to hospital environments. With the expansion of home care, ambulatory services, specialized clinics, mental health services, primary care and telemedicine, care-related risks now emerge across multiple points of the patient journey. In this
[Article]How to prevent Intensive Care Unit-acquired weakness: decrypting MV “bundles”
Patients on mechanical ventilation (MV) in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) have high mortality rates, and, even among survivors, morbidity is significant. In Brazil, the average duration of mechanical ventilation in the Intensive Care Unit is around one week, and
[Article]How good is your ICU performance?
The eBook ICU Operational Indicators is the first volume of the collection 'How Good is Your ICU Performance?' It aims to demystify the significance, intricacies, and applications of healthcare indicators – the vital signposts that guide healthcare professionals, administrators, policymakers,
[Article] Human Factors in Incident and Adverse Event Management: From Individual Error to Systemic Analysis in Patient Safety
Summary: The occurrence of adverse events in healthcare institutions is still often attributed to individual error—an approach that is both technically limited and institutionally counterproductive. International human factors frameworks applied to incident management, such as the Swiss Cheese Model, HFACS and
[Article] We need to be prepared for new outbreaks and health crises: a perspective for ICUs
During the years of 2020 and 2021, the SARS-COV2 (COVID-19) pandemic generated an unprecedented number of patients with severe pneumonia, requiring hospitalization and intensive care. In these months we observed the saturation and collapse of health systems, and the high
[Article] How to choose the best management system for your ICU: 5 essential criteria
The digitalization of intensive care medicine has profoundly transformed ICU operations. Nowadays, a management system (or software) is not just an administrative tool, but a central component for the safety, efficiency, and quality of care. The experience accumulated by thousands of
[E-book] Using the Epimed system for clinical research
On an annual basis, dozens of clinical trials are carried out in Brazil and other countries in Latam and Europe, using data from the Epimed Monitor system. In a recent review, we identified more than 50 publications in indexed scientific
[Article] The new era of the SOFA score: Data-driven innovations for intensive care medicine
The Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score is a clinical tool developed in the 1990s to assess the extent of organ dysfunction in critically ill patients, especially those admitted to intensive care units (ICUs). The score was initially introduced to
[Article] Occupancy rate as a vital metric in ICU operational optimisation
Rational resource use is vital in intensive care units (ICUs) due to their high complexity. Operational indicators offer a quantitative view of resource utilisation, aiding the ICU team in optimising staff deployment, equipment use, and bed availability. Among the most commonly
[Article] ICU Performance: What is the added value of prognostic scores?
Prognostic scoring systems were created to standardise the evaluation of illness severity in critically ill patients by converting complex clinical data into objective, measurable metrics. These scores allow clinicians and researchers to assess and compare risk-adjusted outcomes across various patient