An informatics architecture for the Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

The Laura P. and Leland K. Whittier Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (VPICU) is an ambitious research network focused on building online databases for improving decision-making in pediatric intensive care units. Increasingly, there is a need to unify previously distributed and heterogeneous information captured in these databases to support both traditional retrospective support ad-hoc studies, and ad-hoc analyses. VPICU and NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have constructed a reference architecture and implementation framework that addresses these needs. The architecture is unobtrusive, scalable, and secure, with a strong focus on rapid deployment and integration. This paper reports on the current status of our efforts and details the strength of the framework via our recent work in unsupervised discovery of patient similarity within the hospital.