Providing timely expertise in the care of critically ill patients is one of the main goals of critical care medicine. This is a challenging goal, given the acknowledged shortage of intensive care specialists. It requires the bedside nurse to have real-time access to senior level intensive care physicians, and conversely it requires the senior physicians to have access to the intensive care unit (ICU). The strategic use of information technology (IT) has become one of the important features of modern critical care. IT applications offer the promise of improving patient care, physician efficiency, and patient outcomes. An important need of the senior physician is to interact frequently with real-time patient information and with the bedside nurses from a remote location. Also, Patient satisfaction and facilitation has become a keyword today. By a GO, it has also been made mandatory to allow relatives of patients to be able to see them in the ICU. Thus, there is a need for a user friendly telemedicine solution for the ICU. A & T has designed and developed vICU, a Mobile digital conferencing system suitable for the Indian Hospital and patient environment.
The vICU permits real-time, two-way, face-to-face communication between nursing staff, patients and families in the ICU. This interaction provides important visual information that cannot easily be conveyed by telephone, such as the actual appearance of the patient and body language of the nurse or family. It is easy to understand that visual information such as the basic elements of the neurologic examination, appearance of the skin, appearance of the abdomen, and appearance of the patient's breathing are much easier to appreciate when they are seen directly by the physician rather than being conveyed by a third party.
The vICU is unique in that nurses, patients, and families interact with the Senior physician. The design, user friendliness and mobility will make the nurses take to the system without coercion. This acceptance is critical to the success of the overall process of remote physician involvement. Several features of patient care and patient outcome will improve and significant improvements in hospital mortality, ICU length of stay, and hospital financial profitability in patients can be achieved. vICU will enable increased access to intensive care experts and more frequent interactions between the experts and bedside care givers resulting in improved outcomes.
Further integration can enable viewing and monitoring graphical data from a monitor or flow sheet as well as all the interactive functions from homes over the internet itself. This unit could also be developed into a full fledged eICU functional system. The eICU concept is to create a centralized workstation of senior physicians who supervise multiple patients in a variety of ICUs via high-speed internet connections. This model makes use of electronic medical record systems and real-time remote monitoring of patient monitors with proprietary smart alarms, which empower the senior physicians to take appropriate decisions. This results in a mutual exchange and discussion of ICU data and provides a platform to formulate a multidisciplinary treatment plan at any time of day and from any location. Moreover, the face-to-face process builds trust and camaraderie, both of which are important features of critical care. These elements have resulted in important changes in the care that is delivered to the patient, and in improved nursing satisfaction with physician responsiveness. The vICU and eICU could play a significant role in the delivery of intensive care to remote areas suffering from plague, war, or natural disaster, filling the present gap in the delivery of critical care.
About the vICU
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The unit is designed to be mobile and easy to handle by the nurses. It is a wireless mobile unit with a 15" LCD display. Elegant and beautiful looking, it has all the features built in for a good experience for an interaction by the patients, bed nurses with senior physicians.
