Telemedicine can help ICU care

Intensive care units that used telemedicine---including offsite electronic monitoring---had lower hospital and ICU mortality, fewer complications and shorter stays, according to a study that will be presented at a American Thoracic Society meeting.

The study will also be published in the June 1 issue of JAMA.

According to the study:

• Tele-ICUs use audio, video and electronic connections to assist bedside caregivers in monitoring patients.
• These double-checks ensure best practices with real-time audits.
• Mortality rates were 13.6 percent before telemedicine was used and 11.8 percent after tele-ICUs were implemented. Tele-ICUs also had an average hospital stay of 9.8 days compared to 13.3 days without telemedicine.
• And critically ill patients can be monitored remotely by health care professionals elsewhere.

The study, conducted by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, was performed from April 2005 to September 2007 and included 6,290 adults admitted to seven ICUs on two campuses of an 834-bed academic medical center.

In an editorial alongside the study, Jeremy Kahn, an M.D., M.S. at the University of Pittsburgh, said:

Telemedicine alone does not equate to quality improvement but is merely a tool for quality improvement. Accordingly, a successful telemedicine program will follow the basic tenets of quality improvement: performing a detailed needs assessment, assessing the barriers to practice change, prioritizing specific projects, introducing effective strategies for improvement, and measuring the results in a stepwise fashion. Similar to traditional quality improvement, an approach in which this technology is introduced without setting specific quality goals and defining clear quality improvement processes is likely to fail. Instead, it is important to define specific quality deficiencies in the target ICUs, and then design the telemedicine intervention specifically to address those deficiencies, akin to other types of quality improvement.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com