The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of telehealth programs and features in healthcare facilities all over the country.

Telemedicine offers major advantages:

• Convenience: Bypassing doctor’s offices and waiting rooms by using virtual visits in your home and communicating with healthcare providers outside regular office hours.

• Specialist access: Specialists’ services in high demand can recommend treatment for many patients from afar and share their expertise with other physicians in real time.

• Minimal delay: Critical care doctors use continuously incoming data, virtual examinations to take care of patients across multiple sites with minimal delay.

• Decreased exposure: It reduces potential episodes of direct exposure to people suffering from COVID-19.

• Field hospital capabilities: Hospitals overcrowded with pandemic patients can stretch hospital beds, including intensive care to nontraditional venues because, sophisticated patient data monitoring can be enabled from a central location.

Remote ICU Access:

COVID-19 patients were rising, stretching New York hospitals beyond capacity. So Javits Convention Center in New York City was turned to a temporary hospital.

The intention was to treat patients with non-coronavirus illnesses but then in April, the temporary venue was approved to treat COVID-19 patients. The idea was to allow these makeshift operations to provide care outside the traditional hospital stemmed from an earlier telemedicine innovation: the eICU.

Dr. Steven A. Fuhrman, an intensivist and eICU medical director at Sentara Healthcare, based at Sentara Norflox General Hospital in Virginia says that they get to pat their back as being the first tele-ICU in the country.

The Sentara eICU team operates from the control center in Norfolk & monitors intensive care patients continuously, covering 132 beds at seven Sentara hospitals in Virginia and North Carolina.

A network of monitors, communication links, cameras and alert systems let doctors and critical care nurses do virtual rounds with patients at the in-person ICU sites.

At the control center, intensive care specialists observe patients’ condition and view their X-rays, vital signs and laboratory data in real time. Tablet devices are used by clinicians at the control center within Sentara's Norfolk facility that can interact with onsite healthcare providers, patients and family members at each participating hospital ICUs.

Fuhrman notes that tele-ICU isn’t born of the pandemic. It has extended and expanded due to the pandemic, recognized as vital adjunct to care.