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GE Healthcare, Fortis pioneer Asia's first eICU

09 July 2012 | News | By BioSpectrum Bureau

GE Healthcare, Fortis pioneer Asia's first eICU

New Delhi: Fortis Healthcare and GE Healthcare have launched Asia's first electronic intensive care unit (eICU) facility CritiNext. The eICU services offer accessible specialty critical care and affordability to critically ill patients in small towns of India. The CritiNext e-ICU is powered by GE's Centricity High Acuity Care Solutions and operationalized by critical care experts from Fortis Healthcare. CritiNext is India's as well as Asia's first eICU, covering 34 ICU beds in two small hospitals based in Raipur and Dehradun. This initiative hopes to target 500 ICU beds in 20 small towns by 2014.Two more hospitals - one in Punjab and the other in Uttar Pradesh - are expected to go live soon.

The CritiNext eICU enables a remote hospital to provide advanced consultation, care and monitoring to their critically ill in-patients without having to physically transfer them to super-specialty hospitals. CritiNext eICU helps provide expert care to the patient at the local hospital helping avoid inter-hospital transfer and risks. CritiNext addresses the shortage of critical care staff in remote areas and enables physicians in remote units to manage ICUs more efficiently. Remote ICU Monitoring Technology combined with expert set of eyes can help reduce medical errors and infection within ICUs leading to reduction in patient mortality by up to 60 percent.

Ms Terri Bresenham, president & CEO, GE Healthcare South Asia, said, "We are at work for a healthier India. We innovate solutions that can help break the barrier of healthcare access, cost and quality. CritiNext eICU solution is a perfect example of how we can take scarce, quality expertise and through innovation, extend it for better health of more people. Smart collaborations like this can help unlock new ideas that raise the standard of care for better outcomes."

With GE's Centricity High Acuity Care & Critinext command centre in Delhi, an intensivist can monitor real time parameters of critically ill patients from remote ICUs/Hospitals on a 24x7, 365 days basis. The Critinext team can also assist in timely treatment and monitoring of patients in collaboration with local physicians over audio/video capability provided by GE Solution. Smart alerts built into Centricity can flag trends in patient's condition like picking up a spike in a white blood cell count, the start of a low grade fever, and maybe a little bit of a drop in urine output etc. When an Intensivist at Critinext Command centre puts all those together, they are able to conclude if a serious infection is setting in. Using state-of-the-art rules based engine, clinical parameters are tracked and used to generate clinical notifications which can be overseen in a paper based workflow. It helps in providing pro-active care to save the patient's life.

Dr Amit Varma, executive director CritiNext, Fortis Group of Hospitals, said, "Each year, an estimated 10% of all hospital admissions require ICU care. The statistics are staggering - just 70,000 well equipped ICU beds against an estimated demand of 400,000 ICU beds to provide critical care for approximately five million ICU cases per year. It is equally alarming to see the non-availability of qualified intensive care specialists. Only 6000 intensivists/Anesthetists are catering to the critical care needs of five million patients! Well-equipped ICUs, qualified intensivists and 24x7 availability are key determinants of successful outcomes. CritiNext is a solution to bridge this huge gap of ICU beds by providing specialist care at the point, where it is needed in a cost effective way. It also provides successful evidence based outcomes helping standardize the critical care for the patients irrespective of where they live."

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