Can Tele-ICU Decrease Unexpected Cardiac Deaths?
Unexpected cardiac deathsare known to be a common but avoidable cause of mortalityall overthe world. According to a specialist, almost 10% of deaths in the country usually occur due to this condition. Besides, in 2016, nearly 2.8 million people in India died from cardiovascular diseases as well.
But why is the mortality rate of cardiac issues so high?
Generally, when a cardiac death occurs, it is preceded by derangementin the status of the heartin terms of Blood pressure and or heart rate.By the time, cardia activity stops. Moreover, the issue is more prevalent amongst India’s elderly community (70 years old or more) but youngsters can be affected by it.
Usually,we have a short time limit of around 3-5 minutes in which if we make a suitable intervention medically, the changes can be stopped and reversed before the heart stops. Therefore, it makes it very difficult for medical person to respond to it once it already occurs, thus intensive monitoring by an expert is required to pick up these changes before cardia death occurs. However, proper implementation of Tele-ICU can reduce the number of cardiac death patients to some extent. But, how will it do so? Let’s learn more in this regard.
1. Enables Remote Treatment Procedures
Unlike the urban society in India, the rural community generally lacks access to a proper healthcare system. Besides, most doctors in parts of the country tend to be undertrained.
A study on this subject has suggested that almost 67% of healthcare specialists in rural area do not have medical qualifications. Due to staying in a remote location, many people from rural areas do not visit the cities for treatment because of either shortage of physicians or lack of money.
Thus, the death rate tends to be much higher than usual in these locations.
Amongst the states suffering from this issue, Madhya Pradesh is considered to be the most affected one in this regard. In this region, almost 8.5 people (amongst 1,000) usually lose their life due to not getting proper treatment.
Even in areas where the ICUs are present but because of lack of man power, these presentive signs of impending cardia death cannot be identified by the untrained staff.
However, with the implementation of Tele-ICU, providing remote treatment and picking up early signs of impending cardia deaths or complications can be identified by the trained personnel sitting in the command center. Thus, providing critical treatment at the time of need will be much easier.
2.Ideal for Inpatient Systems
As you can already perceive, a Tele-ICU system can help doctors collaborate with each other when needed. This way, a complete net of monitoring can be spread around patients, where the dedicated teams of the hospital and of command center can together pick up early signs and parameters that are missed either by medical errors or lack of trained personnel.
By doing so, they can reduce the medical errors by almost 56%.
According to a study, almost five million patients in India tend to lose their life due to medical errors. However, when operating under Tele-ICU, at least one physician from the group can keep their eyes on around one to two patients.
Therefore, the occurrence of such common errors will be minimized to some extent.
3. Improvement in Critical Care
Overall, Tele-ICU can improve the critical care segment of a hospital by inducing better medical practices by trainings.
Moreover, even if the event of cardia arrest occurs, the physicians can act quickly on it due to the trainings provided by Tele-ICU unit like ACLS trainings and they can take measure to save the lives of the patients.
Conclusion
The introduction of Tele-ICU can immense the close monitoring of critically ill patients who are at high risk for cardia related events.
In several Tele-ICU units, eNext ICU has been able to decrease unexpected cardia death even to zero. Furthermore, the staying period in hospitals for the patients has been minimized to some extent as well. Hopefully, the system and its core technology will improve even more in the future and help prevent cardiac deaths in the country.
