Cardiac Intensive Care Unit Appropriate Patient Selection and Triage
Updated: May 21, 2026
- Optimizing cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) admission practices through standardized, evidence-informed triage pathways represents an important opportunity to reduce care variation, alleviate capacity strain, lower costs, and achieve optimal patient-centered outcomes.
- A pragmatic 4-step framework to inform CICU triage practices includes: (1) need for critical care–restricted therapies/monitoring, (2) goals-of-care and therapeutic beneficence, (3) risk of early clinical deterioration using diagnosis-specific risk-stratification tools, and (4) institutional level-of-care staffing and capabilities.
- As cardiovascular therapies advance, many historically routine CICU admissions may be safely managed in lower-acuity settings, underscoring the need for validated triage tools that predict risk of in-hospital clinical deterioration to better optimize resource utilization.
Recommended Reading
- Evolution of Critical Care Cardiology: An Update on Structure, Care Delivery, Training, and Research Paradigms
- 2025 ACC/AHA/ACEP/NAEMSP/SCAI Guideline for the Management of Patients With Acute Coronary Syndromes
- Critical Care Management of Patients After Cardiac Arrest
- 2022 ACC/AHA Guideline for the Diagnosis and Management of Aortic Disease