Fortis Healthcare and GE Healthcare has launched Asia’s first electronic intensive care unit (eICU) facility – CritiNext . The eICU services being offered by CritiNext makes speciality critical care accessible and affordable to critically ill patients in small towns of India. It is powered by GE’s Centricity High Acuity Care Solutions and operationalised by critical care experts from Fortis Healthcare. It has gone live in two small hospitals based in Raipur and Dehradun and covers 34 ICU beds.
The CritiNext eICU enables a remote hospital to provide advanced consultation, care and monitoring to their critically ill in-patients without having to physically transfer them to super-speciality hospitals. CritiNext eICU helps to provide expert care to the patient at the local hospital and to avoid inter-hospital transfer and risks. ICU care at local hospital allows patient get better support from family as well as help reduce costs by shortening the stay in ICU. CritiNext addresses the shortage of critical care staff in remote areas and enables physicians in remote units to manage ICUs more efficiently. Remote ICU monitoring technology combined with expert set of eyes can help reduce medical errors and infection within ICUs leading to reduction in patient mortality by upto 60 per cent.
With GE’s Centricity High Acuity Care & Critinext command centre in Delhi, intensivist scan monitor real time parameters of critically ill patients from remote ICUs/hospitals on a 24/7, 365 days basis. The Critinext team can also assist in timely treatment and monitoring of patients in collaboration with local physicians over audio/video capability provided by GE Solution. Smart alerts built into Centricity can flag trends in patient’s condition like picking up a spike in a white blood cell count, the start of a low grade fever, and maybe a little bit of a drop in urine output etc. When an Intensivist at Critinext Command centre puts all those together, they are able to conclude if a serious infection is setting in. Using state-of-the-art rules based engine, clinical parameters are tracked and used to generate clinical notifications which can be overseen in a paper based workflow. It helps in providing pro-active care to save the patient’s life. As part of a national roll out of this technology, Fortis Healthcare and GE Healthcare aim to deploy the solution connecting a minimum of 500 ICU beds in 20 hospitals by 2014.
“We have seen enormous benefit from eICU services already”, said Dr Suryavanshi, Chief Cardiologist, Fortis Hospitals, Raipur , the first centre in India ever to be connected with an eICU. “Over the past 45 days, we have received expert care from Fortis Escorts Hospital, Delhi, 2000 kilometers away from Raipur, virtually and in real time, benefitting over 100 critically ill patients admitted in our hospital.”
EH News Bureau
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