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News Releases
Groundbreaking
Medical Technology Goes “Live”
Memorial
Hermann eICU® Advantage Brings Intensive Care Team Bedside, Around
the Clock
Houston, Texas,
March 29, 2004 – An innovative blend of technology and healthcare
expertise called Memorial Hermann
eICU® Advantage makes health
care history in Houston as it “goes live” providing patients
in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) of two Memorial Hermann Hospitals
an additional layer of critical care experts at their bedside “virtually” 24
hours a day, seven days a week.
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Nada El-Dairi, M.D., at Memorial Hermann's eICU Advantage headquarters
on the Southwest Freeway, checks in on intensive care unit patient, Todd
Morgan, who is 42 miles away in the The Woodlands. |
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Further
improving ongoing patient safety initiatives, Memorial
Hermann The Woodlands Hospital and Memorial
Hermann Southwest Hospital are the first in the southern and southwest
United States to provide their patients with the eICU solution.
The state-of-the-art
system which transforms ICU care by employing telemedicine technology, “smart” software
and electronic monitoring was developed by VISICU, Inc. and serves
as a supplement to existing bedside critical care doctors and nurses.
“This is tremendously
exciting because of its potential benefit to patients,” says Hugh
Gilmore, M.D., vice president and chief quality officer for Memorial
Hermann Healthcare System. “It has the established potential to
significantly reduce mortality and ICU length of stay, and increase nursing
satisfaction and retention.” |
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Connected
to a centralized “mission control”, which is
located at the corporate headquarters for Memorial Hermann Healthcare
System, the eICU Advantage monitors all intensive care cases all the
time. Equipped with early warning software called Smart Alerts®,
the system can never get called away. Armed with these advanced tools,
a team of specially trained, board-certified intensivists and critical
care nurses are ready to respond instantly to the most subtle variations
in vital signs and trends in a patient’s condition and able to
alert the bedside nurses and attending physicians. Because this response
happens instantly, the situation can be addressed before it becomes
more serious.
“We, in the medical field, have known that patients have better
outcomes when their care is overseen by intensivists, but there’s
a nationwide shortage of these specialists,” says Liza Weavind,
M.D., medical director of the Memorial Hermann eICU Advantage. Weavind,
who is also a board-certified critical care physician, added, “We’re
bringing the advantage of bedside intensivist expertise to our ICU’s
in the Houston community by leveraging the power of technology.”
Now that the 16 beds at
Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital and 12 at Memorial Hermann The
Woodlands Hospital are connected, 28 neurotrauma
beds at Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Medical Center are next in
line. Acknowledging that the Houston community needs and deserves this
level of care, Memorial Hermann’s plans seek to link the groundbreaking
eICU Advantage to all 200 ICU beds across the System.
eICU® and Smart Alerts® are
registered trademarks of VISICU, Inc.
For more information,
contact Media Relations.
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