Katrin Spohn

Our next generation digital telemedicine solutions enhance the quality and efficacy of medical care, allowing the healthcare staff to refocus on its original job – caring for the patient. The Tele-ICU team with one highly experienced intensivist can provide service for 100 or more ICU patients at any time by leveraging high quality telemedicine clinical decision support, made possible by predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence. Machine learning can enable the tele-ICU team to identify patterns in large data sets of high-frequency, real-time patient data (e.g. vital parameters, laboratory results, ventilator setup, etc.) to provide support that can range from detection of unintentional pharmaceutical interactions to prediction of deterioration and outcome of ICU patients. This transformation in ICU care will result in large medical competence centers providing this type of high-end telemedicine and will create new specialties such as “Telemedicine Specialist”. Again, telemedicine is not a competitor, but rather a supporter, of ICU performance optimization. Collaboration between centralized centers and bedside teams will lead to improved outcomes, shorter length of stay, decreased purchased care costs, and greater staff satisfaction. The Society of Critical Care recently recommended replacing the term “tele-ICU” with “tele-critical-care” due to the fact that existing tele-ICU providers have extended their service to other departments (e.g. emergency department, stroke unit), indicating fast adoption of telemedicine in broad applications. Furthermore, many medical smartphone apps exist, though quality and relevance varies greatly. As smartphones permeate modern daily life and routine, there is growing interest in utilizing them in telemedicine; however, at this point there is limited large-scale evaluation of this use.