Tele-ICU in the Age of COVID-19: Built for This Challenge

Excerpt

The rapid spread of a virus, never seen before and poorly understood, is a worst-case scenario that requires healthcare to work across a range of organizational, treatment, and operational borders to contain it. Telemedicine’s role during the current coronavirus pandemic remains two-fold: to connect clinicians with patients and to support frontline bedside teams, each accomplished regardless of location. The challenge of the pandemic highlights specific areas in which tele-ICU is built to be the future of critical care: leveraging technology to connect ICU experts to patients in need, applying national best practice protocols in tailored treatment plans, managing ventilators at a high level, responding instantly to advanced cardiac life support needs with situational awareness, and providing the flexibility to innovate to address new needs as they arise. …