ICU Typing Practice

Choosing ICU in the Specialty menu mixes a critical care vocabulary pack into the trainer's general medical stream. You type the lines an ICU team writes every day: system-based progress notes, ventilator and drip strings, procedure notes and goals-of-care language, in spelled-out or shorthand form.

Open the trainer with the ICU pack

Rounds and vent shorthand Drips, intubation drugs and antidotes ICU vocabulary sprint

Preset links open the trainer with those settings already applied; you can change them afterward.

What ICU notes are made of

A floor progress note is mostly words. An ICU note is numbers with words in between. The daily note runs by system (neuro, cardiovascular, pulmonary, renal and fluids, GI and nutrition, infectious disease, heme, endocrine, lines, prophylaxis, code status, disposition), opens with overnight events and often ends with a critical care time statement. Under each heading sit values that change by the hour: ventilator settings in slash shorthand, an ABG string such as 7.19/78/64, norepinephrine in mcg/kg/min and vasopressin in units/min, RASS and CAM-ICU results, urine output and net fluid balance.

Around the progress note come admission notes, procedure notes that follow a fixed order (indication, consent, time out, ultrasound guidance, confirmation, complications), family meeting notes written as narrative, and steady nursing charting on titrations, turns, lines and CRRT alarms. Because the headings are fixed, the typing is the content under them, and that content is formulaic enough that shorthand practice pays off quickly.

What the ICU pack adds

The pack holds 1,100 new items and emphasizes about 1,200 general items that belong to critical care, including many lines from the site's former ICU and anesthesia category chip. About 600 of the new items are note lines, mostly progress-note and plan lines by system, with results, nursing, procedure and family meeting lines around them:

• Pulmonary: volume control 380, rate 26, PEEP 14, FiO2 60%, plateau 27
• Neuro: RASS 0 on dexmedetomidine 0.4 mcg/kg/hr, CAM-ICU negative
• Renal: on CRRT, net negative 1.6 L yesterday, goal negative 2 L today as blood pressure allows
• Lines: right IJ triple lumen day 6, left radial arterial line day 6, Foley day 6
• Failed SBT at 20 minutes with RSBI 130, diaphoresis, and a heart rate increase of 30
• Endotracheal tube tip 1 cm above the carina, recommend withdrawal by 2 to 3 cm

With Abbreviations on, the first line types as Pulm: VC 380/26/14/60%, Pplat 27. Other lines cover ventilator liberation, ARDS rescue, shock assessment, CRRT, DKA, massive transfusion, post-arrest care and the surgical ICU. About 85 read lines cover device position on chest films, ICU CT findings, bedside ultrasound, ECGs, continuous EEG and bronchoscopy. Dosing strings cover about 130 drugs, weighted toward infusions, sedation, intubation drugs, electrolytes, antidotes and reversal agents, for example angiotensin II 20 ng/kg/min iv infusion, titrate q5min to MAP.

How to practice

Turn Abbreviations on for most sessions. Almost no one writes "secondary to" in the unit, and shorthand such as norepi, gtt, SBT, UOP and FWD is what ICU notes actually contain. For a rounds session, keep Note Phrases, Physiology & Labs and Radiology & Path Findings on, Term frequency on Realistic, and Cascade, which lets errors pass and keeps the text flowing like a real note. The chips filter the pack and the general corpus together, so Note Phrases alone still gives general note lines alongside the ICU ones.

For the symbol keys, turn on only Physiology & Labs and the generic drug chip, set the dosing slider to 100 and use Block, which stops the stream until you fix each error. That stream is almost all values and doses, so it isolates the number row, decimal point, slash and percent sign. Five minutes on most days is enough. Check the per-key heatmap afterward, and go back to the full stream when those keys stop showing red. AI Mode works on top of the pack if you want the stream to lean toward your own weak spots.