Fig. 4

Medication orders per hour against patient census: a overall; b when controlling for the time periods (for the rounding period, samples with low and high census were excluded due to low sample size); c when controlling for the presence of severe patients (high vs. low); and d when controlling for the presence of new patients and high mortality risk patients, respectively. The high presence of severe patients was defined as an ICU operational condition with more than 60% of the present patients having ever used IMV at the moment. The high presence of new patients was defined as an ICU operational condition with more than one new patient at the moment. The high presence of high mortality risk patients was defined as an ICU operational condition with more than 33% of the present patients having higher SOFA scores than the chosen criteria at the moment. An error bar indicates a 95% confidence interval for the average of medication orders given a certain patient census