What You Should Know:
– With ICU beds near capacity across the United States,
GE Healthcare announced a strategic partnership with Oregon Health and Science
University (OHSU) that will allow OHSU to oversee and help provide care to ICU
patients across eight hospital sites via a “Virtual ICU” (VICU), using the GE
Healthcare Mural Virtual Care Solution.
– The VICU provides critical care specialists at OHSU
with digital tools to deploy hospital defined care protocols to remotely
identify changes in patient status, respond in real-time, and support local
clinicians caring for patients in their local communities. The VICU will also
extend OHSU’s critical care expertise to patients in rural communities, where
specialists are not otherwise available.
GE
Healthcare today announced a multi-year agreement with Oregon
Health & Science University (OHSU), Oregon’s only
academic health center, that will allow OHSU to oversee and help provide care to ICU patients
across eight hospital sites via a “Virtual ICU” (VICU), using the GE
Healthcare Mural Virtual Care Solution.
COVID-19 Underscores Shortage of Critical Care
Specialists
The COVID-19
pandemic is highlighting a pre-existing shortage of critical care specialists,
nurses and other clinicians across the United States and around the
world, according to a recent
report from the RAND Corporation. Furthermore, a 100-bed hospital may
have only one intensivist who can care for patients requiring
complex care.
In response to the critical care shortage and in
collaboration with OHSU, GE Healthcare developed a customized solution of care workflows
that powers the OHSU VICU. The VICU benefits patients by keeping them in their
local communities near family and friends; supports local economies by
maintaining resources, such as ambulances and revenue, in the immediate area;
and improves efficiency by allocating hospital beds, resources and staff for
the most critical patients.
“Through the Virtual ICU, we can supplement the
local expertise in a variety of ways and durations – from a single shift to
several a week – bringing much-needed relief and support to the clinicians on
the ground,” said Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of OHSU
Healthcare Joe E. Ness, M.H.A., R.Ph. “The VICU allows us to execute our vision
of increasing the level of care in community hospitals, allowing
patients across the state of Oregon to receive the care they need
closer to home while reducing unnecessary transfers and optimizing ICU capacity
in the area.”
Providing Actionable Data
“I can fully focus on the patient – who may be
physically hundreds of miles away — in real time, by watching vital signs, lab
values, waveforms and other parameters,” said OHSU Associate Professor of
Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and TeleICU Medical Director Marshall
Lee, M.D. “And by enabling audio and visual support in the patient room,
I can virtually visit and collaborate with the local, bedside team.”
Mural will also support the OHSU goal of enhancing the
quality of care throughout the system by providing analytics on
clinical information, such as minutiae ventilation data and metrics on clinical
and operational best practices, including pain, delirium and agitation
management. Data tracked and generated by the VICU translates into metrics –
such as length of stay and average ventilation days per patient —
that hospitals can use to refine operations to support improved patient outcomes
and increased efficiency.
Customization
Based on Specific Clinical Workflows
GE Healthcare’s Mural can be customized based on specific
clinical workflows, enabling intensivists and advanced nurses in a central
location to support bedside teams as they care for patients in their
communities. Mural can also support compliance documentation on healthcare
associated infections (HAIs), and prevention measures such as
thromboprophylaxis, stress ulcer prophylaxis and glucose management.
Enabled by Edison, GE Healthcare’s intelligence platform,
Mural can be deployed on-premise via GE Healthcare’s Edge infrastructure or on
the cloud, depending on customer preference and need.
Availability
Currently available in the United States, Canada, China,
Korea, U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, Mural is designed to help reduce the time for
clinical teams to deliver responsive, timely, and compliant care by
digitizing hospital defined protocols, care pathways, and Early
Warning Scores (EWS).
