eICU STUDY: A Proof of Concept

The authors' objective is to study the effect of eICU (electronic ICU) as a supplementary remote intensive care program on improvement in clinical outcomes. The experiment is designed to determine the clinical usefulness before and after evaluation of the effects of eICU program. The setting is two adult ICU of a large 375 bed teaching community hospital in US. The study was undertaken by group of resident physicians after eICU was started to study the impact on few selected parameters in a teaching hospital. A total of 2537Patients admitted to ICU between June 2006 to June 2008 (n= 1310 before and n= 1227 after implementation of the eICU) The eICU Program used intensivists and other healthcare providers to give 24x7 supplemental monitoring and management from a remote location. Supporting software and computer based decision support tool were available. The outcome is to study and compare rate of falls, mortalities, incidence of code blues and length of stay between the two periods before and after the implementation of eICU. In the results no statistical difference was observed in the studied parameters thus showing contrary results to other previous studies. The incidence of code blue (39 vs. 54 with P value of 0.36), length of stay (3.0 vs. 3.1 P value 0.36), mortality rates (77 vs. 90 P value 0.28) and incidence of fall (0 vs. 1 P value 0.28) all show no improve outcomes before and after the implementation of eICU.