Intensive care admission and discharge - critical decision-making points.

Delivery of intensive care has many critical points impacting the outcomes of critically ill patients. Two important key events in intensive care are patients' admission and discharge procedures. The decision making of intensive care experts should be supported in these two points, in order to attain good quality and safe care. We hypothesize that in the future this decision-making process can be effectively supported with information technology. To reveal the complex decision-making, we studied the decision-making processes and information needs of intensive care charge nurses during patients' admission and discharge procedures. We identified several interconnected decision-making steps during these procedures.