Enhanced Intensive Care System

A remote intensive care system allows hospitals to create a system-wide critical care program designed to improve quality, operating efficiency, and economic performance.

Although patients in an intensive care unit (ICU) require round-the-clock specialized care, most ICUs do not have specially trained doctors, or intensivists, available to do this. There is a shortage of intensivists in the United States, where there are fewer than 6,000 actively practicing. With a remote facility linked via telemedicine and computer monitors to hospital ICU rooms, the new system can provide the required care. The facility is staffed with an intensivist-led team that can monitor and care for hundreds of patients much like air traffic controllers monitor hundreds of planes. Called eICU, the system provides constant surveillance, provides the patient with immediate physician access, and arms the physician with the patient information needed to make the right decisions and make them quickly.

The eICU system was developed by Visicu, Inc. (Baltimore, MD, USA), a company founded in 1998 by two intensivist doctors from Johns Hopkins Medicine (also in Baltimore). The company markets the system to large, multi-hospital healthcare systems that want to improve the quality of their ICU care. One such system is Kaleida Health (Buffalo, NY, USA), which uses the eICU system for real-time audio and video monitoring of patients in the ICU units of two suburban hospitals.

"This technology is not meant to replace the human touch or bedside care, but supports the onsite clinicians by offering a safety net to patients in the event of an emergency,” noted Colleen Dowd, director of cICU operations at Kaleida Health. "The result will be improved patient care.”




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