ICU-CARE: An interactive mobile app to enhance the efficiency of daily informal caregiving in the intensive care unit

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PROJECT SUMMARY Actively involving informal caregivers in direct patient care at the bedside in the intensive care unit (ICU) has the potential to improve patient, informal caregiver, and health care system outcomes. Practice guidelines call for the liberal inclusion of informal caregivers as active partners in ICU care, but there is a critical, unmet need to develop tools that effectively operationalize safe and effective caregiver involvement. Our solution, ICU-CARE employs a user-centered design, providing informal caregivers with: 1) a virtual tour and education specific to the ICU environment, 2) interactive educational modules that teach caregivers how to assess and manage common symptoms of ICU patients with evidenced-based nonpharmacologic interventions, and 3) an electronic platform for caregivers to record and track their contributions to patient care. The long-term goal of this STTR project is to commercialize an easy-to-use mobile application that improves the efficiency of day-to-day informal caregiving, facilitates symptom management decisions, and enhances clinical communication among patients, caregivers, and health care providers in the ICU. In Phase I, we will revise and optimize ICU- CARE (Aim 1) by analyzing data from current users of the ICU-CARE alpha version to identify the essential elements of the graphical user interface and educational content. We will use our findings to create a beta version. For Aim 2, we will integrate ICU-CARE with our electronic health record (EHR) system by creating an application programing interface (API). Finally, in Aim 3, we will recruit a purposeful sample of ICU informal caregivers and ICU nurses to participate in task-driven simulations to evaluate preliminary usability, feasibility, and acceptability of ICU-CARE, as well as validate our API connection within an EHR test environment. In Phase II, the team will conduct a fully powered two-group feasibility randomized controlled trial of ICU-CARE versus attention control with a 1-month follow-up. Results from this trial will further determine the app’s feasibility and acceptability as well as test efficacy. The commercial opportunity lies in becoming the standard of care for addressing patients’ symptom needs as well as improving the effectiveness of informal caregiving for over 5 million ICU patients and caregivers per year in the United States.