eICU® Solution Connects Hawaii Army Doctors to Guam Patients The Pentagon to Consider the eICU® for Military Medical Centers in the Pacific June 19th, 2002 By BOB KEAVENEY Daily Record Business Writer Visicu, a Baltimore startup, this week landed a third large purchaser of its "telemedicine" technology, which enables remote monitoring of patients in intensive care units miles away. The U.S. military will install the company's "eICU®" in a medical center in Hawaii, as part of a strategy to extend care for critically ill patients throughout the Pacific region. Doctors at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu will monitor six critical care patients at Guam Naval Hospital, 4,000 miles away. The Pentagon will spend several months studying the efficacy of the new package of software and hardware, with an eye toward installing it at military medical centers all around the Pacific theater. Visicu (www.visicu.com) has been engaged since 2000 in a similar trial at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda. In that case, the hospital's intensive care unit and its remote monitoring station, or eICU®, are in the same building, but Army officials hope to expand the system to other military medical centers. Nowhere else in the world is a single military medical facility responsible for such a large geographic area as Tripler, according to Col. Benjamin Berg, the medical center's chief of critical care. The Visicu system will reduce the need to fly patients to Hawaii for treatment, he said. "Instead of moving that critically ill patient to Tripler to get quality care, you virtually move Tripler to the patient," said Bill Super, chief technology officer for Visicu. He said the system will allow Army doctors to "replace infrequent, personal visits with more frequent, less hassle, virtual visits." The Pentagon is a crucial customer, Super said, because the geography covered by military doctors is vastly larger than that of even rural medical systems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 1997 by two Johns Hopkins Hospital doctors, Visicu spent several years in product development before installing its first package of software, hardware and communications technology at Sentara Healthcare, a hospital chain in Southeast Virginia, in 2000. The company set up the eICU®, where doctors can view real-time medical data about patients, even examining and interacting with them via a video camera and microphone. Visicu also recently signed an agreement for a similar project with the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System. The idea is to allow critical care specialists, of whom there is an acute shortage, to handle more patients than otherwise possible, while increasing the quality of care and lowering costs. Because the eICU® is quiet, unlike hectic ICUs, and because the Visicu system provides information doctors may not get otherwise - and does so in an intuitive, even suggestive, format - doctors can make better decisions despite having more patients, according to the company. At Sentara, it says, mortality rates among critical patients were reduced by about 25 percent, while average lengths-of-stay were shortened. "From its inception, we believed we could use the eICU® technology to save lives, leverage scarce ICU medical talent and still reduce care costs," said Frank T. Sample, Visicu's president and CEO, in a statement. Super, citing industry sources, said the U.S. health care system may have barely more than one-sixth the number of intensive care specialists it needs. Theoretically, he said, it is technically possible to build a single eICU® where all critical care patients in the country would be monitored; though practical considerations make such an idea impossible, it isn't out of the question to create dozens of eICU®s throughout the country.