The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has placed a significant burden on the healthcare sector. With hospitals at full capacity and medical staff facing burnout, both private and public healthcare look towards health-related technological innovations for solutions.
Multiple lockdowns and closures, as well as continuous protocol and lifestyle modifications have set the stage for innovation in healthcare e-business.
The electronic intensive care unit (eICU), or teleICU, is to witness a growth in the region to enable more efficient management for hospitals and emergency healthcare facilities.
These ICU’s facilitate hospitals and clinics in providing expert diagnostic and therapeutic assistance to patients in need of the most critical care by remote intensivist using 2-way audio-visual technology. This makes it possible for hospitals to have immediate access to otherwise scarce critical care specialists in the ICU, emergency room, and medicine or surgery floors, and be connected face-to-face within minutes. Similar to emergency department physicians and hospitalists, intensivists are an integral component of acute care telemedicine.
CEO of renowned consultancy firm Forte Healthcare, Karan Rekhi, states, “The healthcare authorities in the region are doing an excellent job of looking into the implementation of centralised control rooms, from where intensivist staff can monitor, manage patient traffic, and make full use of resources. The goal of an eICU initiative is to optimise clinical expertise and facilitate around-the-clock care by ICU onsite caregivers, whether the caregivers are down the hall from the patient that’s being monitored or in another city.”
“eICU’s serve many purposes, first and foremost of which is the provision of efficient and convenient patient care in a cost-effective way, while reducing risk of caregiver exposure without having to compromise on delivering care, a key area of concern highlighted by the pandemic.”
eICU’s allow for broader coverage, especially in areas with a shortage of specialised medical staff. It also proves beneficial to hospitals already staffed by critical care physicians, allowing them to offload some of their work and gain visibility into what is happening across the hospital and leverage their own skill set more broadly.
Forte Healthcare is a leading healthcare consultancy agency based in the UAE, offering services such as strategic business consultancy, resource planning, operations management, and healthcare investment to name a few. The agency prioritises the wellbeing and health of the people and communities they serve over the firm’s benefit, in order to achieve excellence in healthcare throughout the world. The firm places a special emphasis on the GCC, Africa, Europe, the UK, South East Asia, and the MENA region.
In this new era of advancing virtual solutions, investments within the healthcare sector are of the utmost importance. Virtual doctors can provide timely interventions for critically ill patients, and offer high acuity patient proactive monitoring, support for emergency department staff, timely ICU discharges, and decreased ventilator delays.
As telecommunication technology continues to progress, adoption by healthcare authorities is vital. In 2018, the Dubai Health Authority launched its Smart Homecare services, allowing government healthcare teams to visit patient homes for chronic care management, providing data to physicians. Both private and public sector healthcare entities are looking to enhance patient care throughout the remainder of the pandemic, and for the future.
