Tuesday
May 2, 2006
St. Mary’s Health Center, Jefferson City, Mo., is using a new service connecting hospitals with remote intensivist doctors and experienced critical care nurses 24 hours a day. The remote staff monitoring ICU patients are at a center in St. Louis, but can evaluate patients and alert staff when interventions are necessary, thanks to communications technology by VISICU (www.visicu.com), Baltimore.
Advanced ICU Care, St. Louis (www.advancedICUcare.com), is targeting hospitals with 10 to 40 ICU beds. Those hospitals are not likely to have intensivist doctors on staff, says David Schopp, president of Advanced ICU Care. The service can also help hospitals meet Leapfrog standards, a national voluntary quality program sponsored by employers.
St. Mary’s is connected to the response center through a T-1 line, installed by the hospital’s local telephone carrier. Through this connection, a computerized diagnostic and video feed are in the patient rooms. A mounted camera, microphone and speaker allow nurses and other staff to talk with the clinicians in St. Louis. Marilyn Russell, R.N., director of the 16-bed ICU at St. Mary’s, says the service has already delivered patient care successes since January, when the hospital began using it.
A patient who needed oxygen, and hence was confused, was fussing with her oxygen mask. Remote critical care nurses talked to her for more than an hour, keeping her mind off the mask. “One of my nurses couldn’t have done that and taken care of another patient,” says Russell.
While she emphasizes that the remote monitoring is a supplement, not a replacement for staff, she also says patients benefit from having intensivists evaluate their progress; at St. Mary’s, patients are admitted by a myriad of physician specialists.
“The board-certified intensivists lend a different insight to the patient’s data,” says Russell. “It gives us another set of highly trained eyes to enhance our nurses’ efforts at the bedside.”