How has Tele ICU decreased the mortality of critically ill COVID patients
Background:
The WHO (World Health Organization) has declared this COVID outbreak as pandemic on 11th March, 2020. COVID19, Coronavirus disease-19 is a disease caused by the strain of new coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2, which were originated from the city of China, Wuhan. COVID19 causes various illness in humans ranging from mild to moderate like shortness of breath, dry cough, chest pain, and severe pneumonia.
COVID19 pneumonia causes infection in both the lungs resulting breathing difficulties and also became the cause of death in many cases. Patient who suffers from the severe illnesses require critical care.
The spread of this virus can only be slow down by maintain ‘social gap/distancing’, ‘implementing travel restrictions’, and various precautions like Wearing mask, hand hygiene etc.
Challenges:
This disaster has posed many challenges for the patients who require early treatment. Data has showed that the people of older age groups or having some background histories of any disease are more tend to get severe illness, requiring critical care. In fact, the severe cases have risen rapidly in the second wave of COVID19. Moreover, lack of medical facilities, infrastructure and shortfall of experienced healthcare workers are the major constraints in the delivery of healthcare services in India. In addition to this, the death rate in the second wave of COVID19 has increased sharply because of many reasons, some of them are as follows:
- Non-availability of ICU beds, ventilators, oxygen cylinders.
- Untrained critical care staff who doesn’t know how to use mechanical ventilator & other ICU equipment and how to provide treatment to critically ill patients.
- It has been reported that many healthcare facilities have mechanical ventilators which has been untouched and have ICUs in many areas but is not running due to unavailability of trained critical care staff and intensivist.
Solution:
This crisis needs more solution centric approach to provide treatment to critically ill patients without risking the lives of healthcare workers despite of geographical distribution. To get the quality critical care in this pandemic is the main concern of the population who resides in the remote areas.
An innovative approach to Tele ICU, where experienced intensivists and trained ICU nurses are available for critically ill patients round the clock through a two-way audio-visual camera, act as a blessing in disguise.
By Tele ICU platform, our team of experienced intensivists and critical care nurses oversees larger number of critically ill patients and provides them with the treatment plans. We support & train bed side physicians and staff by managing, triaging, screening& monitoring critically ill patients.
Intensivist present in the command center guides the bedside clinicians and helps them in decision making about clinical procedures, hence act as a force multiplier without actually adding manpower to the spoke hospitals.
Outcomes:
Many Private and Government medical centers and hospitals opted this innovative approach of Tele ICU by eNext ICU where a large network of ICUs were converted into COVID Tele ICU with an aim to provide quality critical care and to reduce mortality rate of critically ill COVID patients.
In Maharashtra, we have covered around 500 COVID ICU beds, where more than 6500 patients have been seen by our team and more than 2000 emergency calls were attended.
With the aggressive engagement and coordination between the Tele ICU team and the Spoke ICU team, more than 40% reduction in mortality rates and more than 50% reduction in mortality in post Mechanical ventilated patients have been documented after implementation of Tele ICUs.
Furthermore, with proper care provided by an intensivist via Tele ICU support helps in early recovery of the patient resulting more than 60% improvement in discharges hence reduces the length of stay.
Post Tele ICU Outcomes
