The Therapeutic Intervention Scoring System ( T I S S ) Computerized in a Coronary Care Unit

Abstract

The nursing staff of a Coronary Care Unit (CCU) are not only concerned with the day to day data on individual patients, they also need to know longer term characteristics of the case group they care for- Both bedside and administrative staff want to know such things as the average age of the patients admitted to the unit, the average stay in the unit, the workload at any time, the mortality rate and much more. Such information is not only time-consuming and tedious to collect but the analyses of the results are normally only available at a much later date and are seldom easiliy accessible to the bedside nurse. In addition, using personnel without critical care training to collect and evaluate the data does not often improve the reliability of results. We now feel that we have found a solution to a number of these problems which puts a very powerful tool in the hands of bedside and administrative staff alike. Both can now obtain immediate answers to many of the questions about our unit which have previously too often remained unanswered due to lack of relevant information.