CAM-ICU Flowsheet
2001The CAM-ICU Flowsheet is the official flowchart presentation of the CAM-ICU bedside assessment for critically ill adults, including patients who cannot give a conventional verbal response.
Version or adaptation
This page describes a version or adaptation within a related instrument family. This profile remains public for clinical and bibliographic context, but it does not add to the headline count of independent core families.
What this tool is and how to interpret its evidence
The CAM-ICU Flowsheet is the visual operational presentation of the Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit. It is not a scientifically independent instrument from CAM-ICU and should not be counted as another delirium-tool family. Its practical purpose is to guide and document the authorised CAM-ICU sequence for critically ill adults, including patients receiving mechanical ventilation who cannot provide a conventional verbal response. The exact tasks, thresholds and decision logic are deliberately not reproduced on this site.
Ely and colleagues validated CAM-ICU in 96 evaluable mechanically ventilated adults using 471 paired daily assessments against delirium-expert DSM-IV ratings. Two trained critical-care nurses achieved sensitivities of 93% and 100%, specificities of 98% and 100%, and inter-rater kappa of 0.96; mean administration time was two minutes. Those figures support the parent CAM-ICU method, not a separate claim that the graphic layout itself has independent accuracy. Later studies have assessed updated and translated flowsheet versions, including a 2026 European Portuguese validation in 42 ventilated ICU patients.
Implementation still depends on training, the patient's arousal state, repeated assessment and appropriate clinical follow-up. A negative result can miss delirium in routine practice, and a positive result does not establish cause. This version page links the original validation and official Vanderbilt-hosted current flowsheet while keeping protected operational content at principle level.
Evidence and practical details
- Full name
- CAM-ICU Flowsheet
- Catalogue class
- Version or adaptation
- Record type
- core-version
- Family
- cam-icu-family
- Related profiles
- CAM-ICU, CAM-ICU-7, CAM-ICU Plus
- Purpose
- Intensive care, Diagnostic assessment (episodic)
- Population
- Adult
- Setting
- Intensive care
- Items
- —
- Administration
- approximately 2 min in the original CAM-ICU validation
- Evidence
- No eligible DTA study identified
- Evidence maturity
- multi-study
- Evidence stage
- implementation-development-or-evaluation
- DTA studies identified
- 0
- Reference type
- Parent instrument validation; the flowsheet is an operational presentation of CAM-ICU
- Reference standard
- Daily delirium-expert DSM-IV assessments
- Validation sample
- n = 96 evaluable mechanically ventilated adults; 471 paired daily assessments
- Cut-off / scoring
- Feature-based CAM-ICU classification; see the current authorised flowsheet.
- Original/source citation
- Ely EW, Inouye SK, Bernard GR, Gordon S, Francis J, May L, Truman B, Speroff T, Gautam S, Margolin R, Hart RP, Dittus R Delirium in mechanically ventilated patients: validity and reliability of the confusion assessment method for the intensive care unit (CAM-ICU) JAMA. 2001;286(21):2703-2710. PMID 11730446
Format and clearly labelled links
An official flowchart presentation of the CAM-ICU bedside assessment for critically ill adults. The tasks, feature wording, response options, thresholds and decision rule are not reproduced here.
Rights, version and permission record
- Instrument access state
- Verified official form — permission is limited
- Instrument host
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center / CIBS
- Current instrument/version note
- 2023 flowsheet
- Rights holder
- E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH and Vanderbilt University
- Licence / rights basis
- CLINICAL-IMPLEMENTATION-PERMISSION-NOT-OPEN-LICENCE
- Rights checked
- 2026-07-19
- Rights-holder contact
- CIBS@vumc.org
Permission scope recorded at the last check
- Clinical use: CIBS permits implementation and clinical use without a permission letter if the required copyright line is retained.
- Research use: Check the current CIBS terms and retain the copyright line; contact CIBS if the proposed use goes beyond implementation.
- Web republication: Permission not established; CIBS directs other uses to its contact address. Link to the form.
- Translation/adaptation: Contact CIBS for uses beyond the stated clinical implementation permission.
- EHR/software integration: Not expressly verified by this review; contact CIBS.
- Commercial use: Not expressly verified by this review; contact CIBS.
Attribution supplied for permitted reuse: Copyright © 2002, E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH and Vanderbilt University, all rights reserved.
Site-text licence boundary: the CC BY 4.0 notice for original deliriumtools.com editorial text does not cover third-party instruments, item wording, forms, article text, logos, screenshots or linked material.
Page record and review status
- Page version
- 3.1.0
- Last factual/source check
- 2026-07-19
- Last rights/link check
- 2026-07-19
- Curator and responsible editor
- Professor Alasdair M J MacLullich — Curator factual and source review complete (not an independent external reviewer)
- Independent external clinical review
- Not yet completed. No independent external reviewer, consortium endorsement or institutional endorsement is claimed.
Corrections and rights-holder notices can be submitted through the contribute and corrections page.
* Where shown, sensitivity/specificity are from the cited evaluation and are not pooled estimates. “DTA studies identified” describes the current audit, not a completed systematic-review count. Citation metadata checked against PubMed or a publisher record does not imply validation, study quality, endorsement or suitability for a setting. See Methodology.