A new 24/7 remote monitoring program from the Mayo Clinic promises to improve care and shorten hospital stays for critically ill patients. According to an announcement from Mayo, the Enhanced Critical Care program will offer monitoring of the most ill patients at six hospitals across the Mayo Clinic Health System.
Critically ill patients will continue to be cared for by their respective local care teams, but an operations center in Rochester, Minn. will employ physicians and nurses to monitor patients' vital signs and other health data on a computerized system, complete with high definition video cameras and computer screens, able to detect changes in a patient's condition.
This service will be available at four Mayo locations in Minnesota and two in Wisconsin.
"It's like having an extra set of eyes on every patient," Dany Abou Abdallah, M.D., director of the critical care unit in Eau Claire, said in the announcement. "With this program, operations center nurses and physicians continuously review patients' vital signs and other data. The minute they notice a potential problem, they can alert the local care team."
Another success story about remote monitoring in Minnesota involves Essentia Health in Duluth, which utilizes daily electronic monitoring of patients and has drastically reduced readmissions, as reported in August.
In July, more than half of accountable care organizations that responded to a survey from Menlo Park, Calif.-based Spyglass Consulting Group said they're using remote patient monitoring to manage high-risk chronically ill patients.
A two-year pilot program conducted at Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Health found that remote video-conferencing between nurses and discharged patients helped to reduce readmissions to the provider by 75 percent. Chief Medical Informatics Officer Alan Snell shared those results during a FierceMobileHealthcare's executive breakfast panel discussion at last December's mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C.
To learn more:
- read the Mayo Clinic announcement
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