This pilot research project examined the many purposes and activities of medical rounds. Crucial for teaching and patient care in an academic medical center, rounds were categorized against the framework of distributed cognition, a theory of cognition grounded in cognitive anthropology. Through a series of observations of interdisciplinary rounds in academic medical intensive care settings, supplemented by interviews with participants, the multiple purposes and perspectives of rounds were organized into a categorical list to aid future work on the topic, especially as they apply to technology development and the field of medical informatics. This work explores the application of such diffuse knowledge in an intensive care setting.