Dive Brief:
- The financial and patient care benefits generated by the adoption of telemedicine in ICUs outweigh the high cost of these tools, according to a study published in the journal Telemedicine and e- Health.
- To do the study, researchers reviewed 55 scholarly articles and case studies published in the US between 2003 and 2013 that looked at the effects of telemedicine tools in ICUs.
- They concluded that even though adopting such technologies could cost as much as $100,000 per bed, telehealth adoption was associated with a 24% decrease in patients' length of stay, which offset the initial investment. Moreover, patients being treated at a telemedicine-equipped ICU were 26% more likely to survive their ICU care.
Dive Insight:
Though telemedicine in the ICU is a very large investment, this study suggests that more hospitals ought to go this way. After all, not only does telemedicine seem to improve outcomes, but the researchers also found that it improves communication among ICU staff members. And slowly, hospitals are responding to these incentives. Another study, found in Medscape, found that the number of hospitals using ICU telemedicine moved from 16 to 213 between 2003 and 2010. The hospitals doing the adoption tended to be large teaching hospitals located in an urban area. But over time, telemedicine in the ICU is likely to reach out further into the suburbs and even into rural areas.