A Knowledge Management Based Approach for Mortality Prediction in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is one of the most information sensitive environments where efforts are made continuously to deliver the optimal health-care for fragile, critically ill patients. NICU health care providers employ cutting edge clinical processes, technologies, and latest tools and techniques to provide care for critically ill new born infants. Research has shown that predicting an infant´s mortality is important in making critical care decisions. Contemporary, 21st century neonatal intensive care involves the active participation of parents. Although, there are neonatal scores that can be used to measure severity of illness, they are complex and are difficult to comprehend for a novice. Hence, there is a need to combine all the care related information to obtain an indication of the newborn infant´s state of health. A new score for Neonatal Mortality Prediction (NMPS) is proposed in this paper. This NMPS would provide an easy to understood numeric value that can be comprehended by both neonatal health care providers and parents. The NMPS would employ factors captured from the antenatal, perinatal and neonatal periods for estimating a consolidated score.