The CONNECT trial has started

🎉 The CONNECT trial started on 1 October 2026. CONNECT (Patient Characterization Panel to Improve Satisfaction With the Intensive Care Unit Stay) tests a simple, low-cost idea: that the care team, the patient and the family can make the patient visible as a person, not only as a clinical case. You can find the trial description on our clinical trials page.

💡 The intervention

The “Patient as a Person” panel, called “Come to Know me” (in same places, ‘Who I am’), is placed near each patient’s bed. The care team, together with the patient and family, records who the patient is outside the hospital: how they like to be addressed, their interests and what matters most to them. It was inspired by the “Get to Know Me” poster developed at Massachusetts General Hospital and has 19 fields. Physicians, nurses, physiotherapists and other health care providers are trained to use this information in daily care.

🧪 Design

CONNECT is a stepped-wedge cluster randomised trial. All six ICUs start with standard care, and one ICU moves to the intervention every two months until all have adopted the panel. The study lasts 14 months and aims to include 966 patients and their family members. Adult patients admitted for more than 48 hours are eligible, together with their family members or legal representatives. The primary outcome is family satisfaction with the ICU stay, measured with the FS-ICU 24R questionnaire. Secondary outcomes include patient-reported quality of communication, staff perceptions of the panel, and symptoms of anxiety and depression at three months. The people who administer the questionnaires are blinded to the study period.

🏥 The hospitals

• Hospital das Clínicas, University of São Paulo Medical School (HC-FMUSP), São Paulo: four ICUs in a public, academic, quaternary-care hospital.
• Monte Klinikum Hospital, Fortaleza: two ICUs in a private, tertiary, non-academic hospital.

We chose this combination to cover different hospital types, patient and family profiles, and care organisation.

👥 The team

CONNECT is led and part of the PhD of Amanda P Botega, a stellar intensivist, supervised by Prof. Daniel Forte and Otavio Ranzani. Dr. Sabrina Ribeiro coordinates the trial at Monte Klinikum.

🔗 Trial registration

CONNECT is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT07830043).