How COVID-19 Transformed Remote Intensive Care at Houston Methodist

Healthcare organizations are undergoing rapid digital transformation in response to the coronavirus pandemic, especially in intensive care units where remote monitoring capabilities are vital to treating patients and protecting providers.

At Houston Methodist Hospital, the organization's response to COVID-19 accelerated its plan to implement virtual intensive care units, shifting from a two-year to a six-month project.

"If you think about true remote monitoring for these COVID patients in ICU units, that's where we had to really escalate things across our organization," says Vice President of Innovation Michelle Stansbury.

In partnership with Medical Informatics Corp., Intel, and other technology partners, Houston Methodist moved swiftly to implement the Sickbay clinical surveillance and analytics platform specifically for ICUs. As a result, the organization was able to expand its bed capacity within minutes and deliver effective care to ICU patients while limiting care team exposure to the virus.

"The technology itself is just amazing," Stansbury maintains. "We used to have to have intensivists through the night at all of our hospitals. We now don't need to do that. We now have a central monitoring place without having to have intensivists directly on site or at least as many as you would think that they would need."

The technology combines evidence-based decision support and waveform data from disparate connected devices to provide a single source of truth to ICU staff remotely, in the command center and other locations including offices, conference rooms, and home. The patient acuity list uses a series of real-time calculators that create a measure of aggregated risk to further support virtual rounding on the patients that are deteriorating faster.

"When we put this in, you got a lot of excitement from physicians on just the capabilities alone of being able to get a single source of data to be able to make better predictions," Stansbury continued. "And that's ultimately what we're all trying to get: How can you better predict an outcome of a patient that has these symptoms? With a system such as this, the capabilities are endless and there's more that we want to do."

Houston Methodist Hospital has continued to expand capacity of ICU beds for the virtual ICU and now ahead of capacity. Next up is expanding remote care and central command monitoring and algorithms in lower acuity areas and telemetry to help triage and predict decline and work towards reducing and avoiding ICU admissions.

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See Houston Methodist's vICU in action