Tele-ICU investment worthwhile for hospitals, study says

At $100,000 per bed for implementation alone, tele-intensive care unit technology (ICU) is a costly investment. However, an extensive literature review from researchers at Marshall University of South Charleston, W.V., concludes that this investment pays off, as it decreases costs of providing intensive care and improves patient outcomes such as mortality and length of stay.

The study, appearing in the journal Telemedicine and e-Health, involved a literature search and review of case studies, encompasses a total of 55 references.                

Of these, several case studies supported the use of telemedicine in ICUs to provide intensive care to patients who lived in rural areas and lacked access to traditional ICUs. Specifically, the authors found that the benefits of using tele-ICU can offset high investment costs by reducing costs by 24 percent via decreased length of stay for patients.

“Implementation of tele-ICU may have been more beneficial than costly, and it may have provided healthcare organizations the opportunity to increase quality of care and decrease mortality, while it might have decreased costs of delivering ICU services in both rural and urban areas,” the authors wrote.

The findings are especially significant as 30 percent of total hospital costs in the U.S. take place in the ICU.

“Tele-ICU has the potential to be the wave of the future in intensive care medicine due to the costs savings and improvement of provided quality of care,” the authors concluded.

Read the full study here.