VISICU - eICU (R)
VISICU's solution networks multiple hospital ICUs together into a central facility (eICU® center), to reach more patients, leverage scarce intensivists, and provide a 24x7 expert safety net. The VISICU technology identifies impending problems, prevents errors, guides decision-making, and tracks performance.Situation
Hospitals are currently at or over capacity. As demographics shift and baby boomers age, the problem is only going to get worse. The number of intensive care unit (ICU) patients will increase as will the overall number of hospital patients. In fact, it is predicted that the number of ICU patients will double in the next 15 years. Not only will the ICU population base increase, so will the acuity of ICU patients. In other words, not only will there be more patients, they will be sicker patients.Intensivists are physicians with advanced certification training and experience in critical care. Typically they have completed a fellowship in critical care after serving a residency in internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, anesthesia, or surgery. Dedicated intensivists provide great value to ICUs. Unfortunately, there are only about 5,500 actively practicing intensivists in the United States. This shortage severely limits their impact nationwide: less than 15% of ICU patients have dedicated intensivists, and more than 50% of ICU patients have no intensivists at all. Numerous studies have confirmed that intensivist involvement in the care of ICU patients leads to double-digit improvement in patient outcomes, and The Leapfrog Group (an association of Fortune 500 companies) has called for full-time intensivist staffing as a way to save more than 50,000 lives per year.
Solution
VISICU Inc., a Baltimore-based company, is the innovator and leading provider of remote monitoring and management technology for the ICU. The VISICU eICU® critical care program allows hospitals and health systems to reorganize the delivery of critical care patient services, creating an integrated program that effectively standardizes clinical practices. The eICU program networks multiple hospital ICUs together into a central facility (eICU center), to reach more patients, leverage scarce intensivists, and provide a 24x7 expert safety net. The VISICU technology identifies impending problems, prevents errors, guides decision-making, and tracks performance. The result is a critical care program that brings quality to a new level and achieves unprecedented breakthroughs in clinical outcomes and economic benefit. VISICU's eICU program offers a low-cost way to leverage scarce intensivists with a model that could be implemented in every ICU. VISICU's software supports 24/7 ICU monitoring by intensivists through an infrastructure of real-time monitors, electronic medical records, and telephonic and video conferencing. The system is currently installed at 31 health systems covering over 100 hospitals and more than 270 ICUs nationwide.Better Health & Lower Costs
The following are the major clinical results of a study by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young on two Sentara Healthcare hospitals:- 25% reduction in severity-adjusted hospital mortality rate for the ICU population
- 17% decrease in both ICU and floor length of stay (LOS)
- 20% increase in ICU cases as a result of capacity created by shortening ICU LOS
- 17% decrease in LOS (both ICU and floor)
- 15% decrease in daily costs of ICU care, attributable to 4% decrease in nursing worked hours per patient day · 18% decrease in ancillary costs (pharmacy, supplies, therapies, labs, etc.)
- $2,150 per patient financial benefit attributable to lower costs, after adjusting for revenue loss in 'fee-for-service' and 'per-diem' patients
- $460,000 increase in gross monthly revenue due to additional ICU cases.
If you think of this from a big-picture standpoint, if VISICU’s eICU program was implemented in every American ICU, 150,000 lives could be saved at a cost savings of over $8 billion a year. Furthermore, if every Veterans Hospital ICU was networked to an eICU program at its regional hub (21 regions), the Veteran's Administration would save $100,000 per ICU bed (equaling $350 million a year) and many thousands of lives saved.
