Ken Alltucker
The Arizona Republic
MESA (March 18, 2008) - Patients at Banner Health hospitals may want to take note: the eye in the sky is watching.
Arizona's largest health-care provider, Banner Health Systems, has installed cameras and monitoring devices that allow doctors and nurses to remotely watch over the most critically ill patients at nine hospitals in Arizona and Colorado.
Welcome to health care, 21st-century style.
"We are there as a second set of eyes and ears," says Kate Trenary, a former nurse and director of Banner's remote ICU system.
The telemedicine center, located at Banner's Desert Medical Center in Mesa, is a back-up system of sorts that aims to help doctors and nurses who are at the hospitals that treat critical patients.
Touted as the first such system used by a hospital in the Southwest, Banner named its remote program iCare ICU.
Within two years, every Banner hospital will be equipped with the cameras and data-transmission equipment that allow doctors and nurses to help take care of patients from afar.
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