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Emory Healthcare is monitoring 138 Critical Care Beds Remotely Though Philips eICU program

1,620 views · Published 17 August 2016 · 3:34 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: Philips Healthcare · 2016 · Science & Technology

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I feel that our program and the way we care for patients is different and that we’re, sort of, leading the way for a different care team in how we take care of patients. My name is Cheryl Hiddleson, and I work for Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m the Director of eICU Operations there. We currently monitor 138 beds. We have patients in four of the Emory hospitals, and we have patients in an outlying hospital in South Georgia. We started because we wanted to show a different care team. Instead of having intensivists at the bedside 24/7, we decided that we would train the non-physician providers specifically for critical care, and then have the intensivists in the eICU. With that, we have tried to standardize care across the units at Emory that we monitor, and our goal was really to reduce the cost of care, reduce certain procedures that weren’t necessary for all patients but were probably being done more frequently than they should. CMS obtained an independent company that came and did analysis of the data for our system and our program, and they used different statistical analysis to measure different metrics for our program. There was a reduction in cost for all patients that we’re monitoring. There was also a reduction in the 30-day and 60-day readmission rate. There are different hospitals who have decided to create a program with their homegrown system, so to speak. They put a camera in a room or have a cart, and they don’t have the capability of doing the surveillance and the continue monitoring that we do. They do more of an episodic-based monitoring model, and we feel that the real value is in the continuous monitoring and surveillance so we can let people know when something is happening that is not expected, when a patient is veering off trajectory and we need to intervene and get someone in the room. The clinical validation that Philips does is very extensive, and we do feel like the algorithms they’ve developed in the program tools are very specific to critical care patients, and they’re very    useful in our program. The patients that we take care of in South Georgia are very happy, and they feel very safe to know that they have Emory intensivists taking care of them. Emory has a name in the southeast, and people are familiar with it because of the long history of the medical school. And, they also like knowing that the non-physician providers are right there and that they have someone to talk to when there is a problem at 2:00am. If a patient arrests and there are big problems, and the family isn’t sure what to do, there’s a physician who is immediately available for them. They don’t have to wait until nine o’clock the next morning when someone’s making rounds and the usual people are in the unit. They have someone available to them 24/7, and it makes a huge difference to them. From a comfort standpoint, it makes them feel like someone really cares and that there’s someone there.

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