From the December 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


If something doesn’t look right, then the centralized team taps into the patient’s room through the cameras and microphones and determines if they need to alert the bedside care team.

A study conducted by the University of Massachusetts Medical School and published in CHEST Journal in December investigated the impact that eICU had on 118,990 critical care patients in 56 ICUs, 32 hospitals and 19 health systems over the course of five years. They found that the patients were 26 percent more likely to survive in the ICU and also that discharge from the ICU was 20 percent faster.


“The patients are getting discharged faster and there is the ability to use your capacity better — that has to lead to substantial savings as well,” said Varma. There are currently 50 health systems in the U.S. using eICU.

Breslow hired an independent consulting firm in 2004 to investigate the financial outcome of tele-ICUs. The firm found that there was a 24.6 percent decrease in costs per patient and it was attributed to improved clinical outcomes and shorter lengths of stay. Philips is the leader in the tele-ICU market, but Cerner Corporation and iMDSoft also have their own solutions. Cerner’s product is called Critical Care/Critical Connections, which is built around their existing EMR system and electronic charting of ICU nursing and physicians’ information.

iMDSoft’s product is called the MetaVision Suite that involves a clinical information system for ICUs called MVICU. It includes smart alarms based on their physiological parameters and tailored for each patient.

Manu believes that eventually, all health systems will have some sort of tele-ICU program in place. “I absolutely expect every health system to have a telehealth strategy for their organization,” he said. “If that is the case, some of them might not start in the ICU, but given that the highest cost area in the hospital is the ICU, you would think that a lot of them would absolutely have a similar concept in place.”

Making CT available for everyone
Many ICUs have recently been showing an interest in having their own CT in order to avoid transporting critically ill patients to their radiology departments, according to Siemens Healthcare.

In some hospitals, the ICU is on the top floor and the radiology department is on the bottom floor, which makes it a cumbersome process to transport the patients. The staff often needs to switch the patients to mobile life support equipment and a nurse or respiratory technologist has to accompany them.

December 2014 Magazine

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