{Benefits of a Knowledge-based System for Parenteral Nutrition Support: a Report after 5 Years of Routine Daily Use}

Calculating the daily changing composition of parenteral nutrition for small newborn infants is troublesome and time consuming routine work in neonatal intensive care. The task needs expertise and experience and is prone to inherent calculation errors. In 1996 we introduced a knowledge-based system called VIE-PNN at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). It supports the daily calculation of nutrition plans for combined parenteral and enteral nutrition of newborn infants utilizing textbook knowledge and clinical rules of expert neonatologists. VIE-PNN uses a HTML-based client-server architecture and is integrated into the intranet of the local patient data management system (PDMS). The system is now in daily routine use for more than 5 years at 2 NICUs. Its main benefits are considerable time savings for clinicians and an increased quality of care. The main factors for success are its ease of use, its robustness, the integration into the PDMS, and the maintainability by the clinical experts. Most important, physicians highly value the time savings the system provides.