Establishment of a Chinese critical care database from electronic healthcare records in a tertiary care medical center

The medical specialty of critical care, or intensive care, provides emergency
medical care to patients suffering from life-threatening complications and
injuries. The medical specialty is featured by the generation of a huge amount
of high-granularity data in routine practice. The data comprise hourly vital
signs, ventilator waveforms, medical orders, and laboratory results.
Currently, these data are well archived in the hospital information system for
the primary purpose of routine clinical practice. However, data scientists
have noticed that in-depth mining of such big data may provide insights into
the pathophysiology of underlying diseases and healthcare practices. Clinical
questions related to risk factors, predictive analytics, cost-effectiveness,
and causal inference can be addressed with the critical care database. There
have been several openly accessible critical care databases being established,
which have generated hundreds of scientific outputs published scientific
journals. However, such work is still in its infancy in China. China has a
large patient population, which contributes to the generation of a large
healthcare database in hospitals. The establishment and sharing of such a
database can help to promote the open data science and discover novel
scientific knowledge in a collaborative way. In this data descriptor article,
we report the establishment of an openly accessible critical care database
generated from hospital information system. The database comprises 8180 unique
hospital admissions for 7638 individual patients from January 2012 to May
2022. The database contains 11 plain text relational tables that can be linked
by _hospital_ID_.