Telemedicine has shown in the past a strong propensity to reduce demand on expensive, hospital-based services. It’s a form of ‘hub-and-spoke’ network that allows providers to reserve their most qualified and expensive staff for the most serious cases, and still deliver high quality care to their patients.
This is even possible in intensive care environments, with many providers in the United States deploying telemedicine to allow smaller, community ICUs to offer a similar level of service to larger facilities.
A recent study from the University of Iowa explored how effective these services were when The Veteran’s Administration (VA) implemented tele-ICU across it’s network recently. The study found that hospitals using the technology saw a reduction in transfers of ICU patients to other facilities when compared to hospitals that didn’t use the service. This had no impact upon the mortality rate of patients.
“Tele-ICU provides acute care expertise remotely to help local ICUs treat critically ill patients. Our study validates that it prevents transfers to other facilities without increasing the risk of mortality,” the researchers say.
Shared expertise
By using telehealth technology, it allows the local centers to co-manage patient care with experts based in big city hubs. Care is managed using cameras and shared vital signs, and the study found that this often prevented the need to triage patients to larger centers with advanced capabilities.
“The on-site treatment helps to lower the cost of care and improves patient, family, and staff satisfaction,” the authors explain.
Overall, some 550,000 patients were tracked via the VA’s ICU treatment. Nearly 100,000 of these had access to Tele-ICU. Data was accessed for all patients admitted to over 300 VA ICU facilities between October 2009 and September 2015.
The analysis revealed that interhospital transfers decreased by 1.47% when Tele-ICU facilities were available, with these findings not affected by the severity of illness, time and date of admission, or even ICU patient volumes. What’s more, the decrease was seen in all patient groups. This change appeared to have no impact on 30-day mortality levels, suggesting it’s an effective way to deliver high-quality care to remote areas.
