ICUs can boost patient survival rates and speed ICU and hospital discharge rates if they use tele-ICU technologies, a study published in CHEST Journal concludes, according to a report in iHealthBeat.
The study involved researching the impact of tele-ICU technologies in 56 ICUs that were part of 32 hospitals and 19 health systems, tracking them over a five-year period, according to iHealthBeat. The project, which was led by Craig Lilly, director of UMass Memorial Medical Center’s eICU Program, involved more than 110,000 patients.
The hospitals involved in the study used the Phillips Healthcare eICU technology, a comprehensive set-up which included bidirectional audio and video equipment, population management tools and real-time and retrospective reporting tools.
The study looked at how ICU doctors created treatments based on best practices, and responded to patient alerts and alarms, iHealthBeat notes.
Researchers found that patients who received care in hospitals using telemedicine were 26 percent more likely to survive in the ICU than patients in units that didn’t use tele-ICU technologies. It also found that patients were 16 percent more likely to survive their hospitalization than their counterparts who didn’t receive tele-ICU services.
What’s more, researchers found that patients in ICUs using telemedicine saw 20 percent faster discharges in the ICU and 15 percent faster hospital discharges.
This research strongly suggests that tele-ICU is maturing, and should be taken seriously as part of a hospital’s treatment arsenal. In fact, your hospital might want to take a look at a new set of best practices created by the New England Healthcare Institute designed to make tele-ICU more scalable and accessible to hospitals.
Ultimately, the ideal is to connect telemedicine — and other remote sources of data — to hospital EMRs, allowing a new level of collaboration between far-flung clinicians. But in the mean time, it seems that tele-ICU can offer great benefits even if it creates a data silo for the time being.
[…] be able to achieve positive clinical results that lessen the sting of the expense. For example, a recent study published in CHEST Journal concluded that hospitals can boost patient survival rates and speed ICU and discharge rates if they […]