McKee Medical Center adds eICU® for added care to ICU patients

LOVELAND, Colo.  (Nov. 11, 2009) – McKee Medical Center this month became the third Banner Health hospital in northern Colorado to implement eICU®, a remote monitoring system that provides an advanced and additional layer of care for the hospitalized patients in the Intensive Care Unit.

The eICU® technology is part of Banner Health’s iCare Intensive Care program. In the program, specially-trained clinical staff back up physicians, nurses and other caregivers at the bedside and help monitor ICU patient information 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These specially-trained staff members work from a command center at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Ariz., and connect with the individual facilities electronically. At McKee, they will assist in observing six ICU patient beds.

From the command center, specialists can assist the bedside caregivers to pick up nearly imperceptible changes in a patient’s condition or vital signs. Because intensive care patients are so medically fragile, this early warning system can help head off life-threatening complications.

When the specialists, called intensivists, detect a problem or concern, they can talk live to the caregivers at the bedside via voice and video. This timely response can result in shorter hospital stays with fewer patient complications. The intensivist is not a replacement for any caregivers at the hospital but rather an additional practitioner who has immediate access to the patient’s vital signs, medical records, test results, X-rays, and other items in the medical record.

The substantial benefits from the eICU® solution will be seen by the sickest patients in reduced complications, shorter hospital stays and lower mortality rates.

How eICU® works at McKee

• Intensive care units in 10 Banner Health facilities are equipped with a high resolution, full motion video camera and audio hookup in each ICU patient room and connections to computerized remote monitoring systems.
• On-site physicians, critical care nurses and other professional staff continue to provide intensive bedside care.
• The eICU® staff is linked to hospital staff by voice, video and data technology. They serve as a high-tech safety net for the most critically ill patients, providing an additional layer of monitoring and expertise.
• Vital signs such as heart rhythms, blood pressure and pulse, laboratory data and video images from each patient are fed from McKee to Mesa over secure dedicated data lines.
• Activation of video and audio connections occurs only “on demand” when a nurse at the bedside needs assistance or when the remote eICU® physician or nurse needs to examine a patient; and only with the knowledge of the patient and on-site staff.
• The eICU® care team closely collaborates with on-site professionals in providing immediate supervision and care management.
• Additionally, the off-site intensivists are immediately available to direct on-site intervention by staff in emergencies in cooperation with a patient’s attending physician.
• A dedicated hotline based in each hospital ICU provides a direct telephone connection to the eICU® team.

Patient Benefit
Studies have demonstrated that around-the-clock support from an eICU® facility has been effective at:

• Reducing clinical complications
• Extending intensivist expertise to more patients across the network
• Improving patient outcomes and length of stay
• Reducing health care costs
• Collecting useful data that may be analyzed to improve clinical processes.

About McKee Medical Center
McKee Medical Center in Loveland, Colo., is a 132-bed nonprofit, acute-care hospital that offers excellence in health care including cancer care, women’s services, orthopedics and surgical care. McKee is part of Banner Health, a nonprofit health care system based in Phoenix, Ariz., with 22 hospitals throughout the West.