Virtual Intensive Care Unit - ICU of the Future System promises to reduce medical errors and pool intensive care talent from multiple hospitals July 17th, 2002 By Gary Nurenberg, Tech Live Patients in intensive care units are getting some intensive scrutiny at three hospitals in southeastern Virginia. They are recovering in electronic intensive care units, eICU®s, and are monitored by doctors who are miles away. Tonight's "Tech Live" takes a look at this technology. Doctors who are specialists in intensive care watch several dozen ICU patients via cameras, microphones, and a constant data flow fed by attached monitors. They can't reach out and touch the patients, but insist those patients are getting better care. Nurses and residents remain in the hospitals while doctors specializing in intensive care medicine track patients' progress in workstations as far as 25 miles away. The system is currently being used in four intensive care units at three Norfolk, Virginia-area hospitals. "What we are trying to accomplish is putting a physician in a patients' room [and] having every piece of information that he might have if he were physically there," said Frank Sample, CEO of Visicu, creator of the eICU®. The remote monitoring is done with cameras that can zoom in on a patient, or even an IV pump, microphones that allow a doctor to talk to the patient and hospital staff, and continuous data monitoring of temperature, heart rate, and everything a doctor can see at the bedside. On-site nurses and residents carry out doctors' instructions. "To me, the ICU of the future is going to be taking care of 150 to 200 beds with probably about 10 workstations," said Mike Breslow, Visicu executive vice president for clinical research and development. In conventional ICUs, primary doctors visit patients perhaps twice a day. It's different in an eICU®. "A patient is now seen by a physician, by an intensivist, perhaps 10 or 20 times a day," said Dr. Steven Fuhrman, an intensive care specialist who is using the system in Virginia. Doctors say it enables them to respond to changes in a patient's condition more quickly. "The time between identification of a problem and a physician responding is dramatically shortened," Breslow said. Increasing reaction time Proponents argue the system is good for the patient and good for the doctor. Most malpractice suits are filed because a doctor or nurse didn't respond to a medical condition quickly enough. The remote monitoring system, they argue, allows doctors to respond more quickly, and provide a more rapid response to changes in a patient's condition. Currently, eICU® is up and running in Southeastern, Virginia, at Sentara Healthcare, where doctors located at an eICU® site monitor up to 50 beds in four intensive care units at three different hospitals within the Sentara system. eICU® will be rolled out in the fall of this year at the University Hospitals of Columbia and Cornell, which are part of the New York Presbyterian hospital system, and the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, where doctors will be utilizing the eICU® system to practice medicine on patients 4,000 miles away in Guam.