Loyola University Medical Center

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (January 29, 2010) — Loyola University Medical Center (LUMC) is a nationally renowned healthcare facility and one of the country’s top academic medical centers, widely recognized for its excellence in patient care and the education of health professionals. The Medical Center is committed to providing the best possible health care for today and tomorrow in an environment that embraces innovation.

The facility’s Ronald McDonald Children's Hospital is a hospital within a hospital, including a pediatric intensive care unit designed with the latest technology. Their pediatric critical care specialists provide intensive care for sick children requiring a range of care from close monitoring to advanced life support. The children’s hospital has received recognition for excellence in neonatal intensive care, neurosurgery, cancer and other disciplines.

Enabling Excellence with Telemedicine In the LUMC culture of embracing innovation, the children’s hospital places strong emphasis on staying in the forefront of medical technology. Mobile telemedicine technology from GlobalMed is one of the state-of-the-art technology advances helping them improve clinical outcomes and save the lives of very sick children every day.

The visionary instrumental in bringing telemedicine into the Loyola children’s hospital was Dr. Kathleen Webster, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Pediatric Critical Care, who is also the Division Director for Pediatric Critical Care and the Medical Director for the Pediatric ICU. Dr. Webster had gained experience working with telemedicine before joining the Loyola staff, and she knew it would be an invaluable asset in a teaching facility. She initially envisioned telemedicine as a tool for the ICU.

“As an academic medical center, we have residents and medical students as well as senior attending physicians and faculty on staff,” explained Dr. Webster. “In our ICU, there are resident physicians on duty 24 hours a day. We also have three supervising attending physicians, and one of us is always on call. Whenever a resident admits a high-risk patient, such as an infant under one year old, or when a sick child is transferred into the ICU for critical care, it’s mandatory that an attending physician see the patient being admitted.”

With just three attending physicians, and often only one present in the unit, this puts a lot of pressure on both the physicians and residents, especially in life-threatening critical care cases. Dr. Webster knew that with telemedicine technology, the ICU attending physicians would be able to see newly admitted patients and monitor vital signs like heartbeat and respiration in real time from wherever they may be. It would also allow them to provide immediate guidance and assistance to the residents whenever they needed help treating critically ill children.After researching and evaluating a number of different telemedicine options, Dr. Webster and her team chose GlobalMed’s Wireless Mobile Video Cart.

A Solution That Meets All Their Needs “We didn’t look at it purely from the technology perspective. We looked at it from the aspect of the problem we were trying to solve: how to get more attending physician involvement and oversight with our existing staff, without requiring more attending physician presence onsite.” The team’s selection criteria called for a telemedicine solution that was portable so they could take it to the patients, moving from bed to bed, instead of being limited to a few hardwired rooms. The GlobalMed mobile carts give them a comprehensive portable solution, with full-screen high definition-capable video monitors, echo-free audio, remote-camera control, medical-grade power systems and a stethoscope attachment for monitoring vital signs.

The mobile carts integrate with virtually any computer-based visual communications software. This enables real time video teleconferencing and communication between the patient’s bedside and the physician at any internet-enabled remote location. Now the attending physician can do everything he would be able to do bedside except touch the patient. Dr. Webster’s team also required secure transmission of patient information and video that would meet HIPAA requirements for patient confidentiality. The mobile telemedicine carts come equipped with HIPAA compliant video conferencing software.

Expanding Beyond the ICU With the mobile telemedicine carts, the children’s hospital medical staff can now reach any child anywhere in the hospital. Following the early success in the ICU, they soon began expanding use of the carts to address pediatric emergency situations and code events outside the ICU, including the emergency room.

Dr. Webster recalls a situation that really brought home to her the life-saving power of telemedicine. “I was on call, and getting ready to leave for the hospital. My phone rang just as I was about to walk out the door. A patient was arresting. My 20-minute drive to the hospital would have taken far too long to see the patient in time.”

“The onsite medical team had a mobile cart at the patient’s bed, and I was able to just log on to my computer, see exactly what was happening, assess the situation and begin directing critical care immediately, until the patient was stabilized. This never would have been possible without telemedicine technology.”

Empowering New Rapid Response Teams In keeping with the current national focus on improving healthcare, the Loyola children’s hospital implemented a Rapid Response Team Program. The rapid response teams consist of a specially trained ICU nurse and a respiratory therapist equipped with a mobile telemedicine cart.

The rapid response teams bring critical care expertise to patients outside the intensive care unit (ICU) whose condition is deteriorating or life threatening and who need immediate assessment. Their goal is to provide timely assessment of the patient, and assistance to the bedside care team, including critical care intervention and transfer to the ICU if necessary. The telemedicine carts are an integral element in the program, empowering the teams to administer emergency care under the real time guidance of the ICU attending physician from the moment the team reaches the patient.

Improving Clinical Outcomes Every Day The GlobalMed mobile telemedicine carts are helping children’s hospital improve quality of care and clinical outcomes in many other ways every day. Doctors can make contact with patients more quickly and conveniently, and see patients they might not otherwise have been able to see right away. The onsite staff can also access the expertise of medical specialists for real time diagnosis and treatment guidance without the experts having to rush to the hospital in the middle of the night.

“Residents and nurses in the pediatric ICU are extremely enthusiastic about telemedicine,” observed Dr. Webster. “They especially like that the doctors can immediately review anything they have a concern about any time of the day or night. With the mobile telemedicine carts, they can connect with attending physicians to ask questions right from the patient’s bedside, validate diagnoses, examine x-rays together, and have the doctors see the effect of treatments in progress.”

Through the combination of the rapid response team program and the enhanced critical care enabled by the GlobalMed mobile telemedicine carts, the mortality rate of children who are admitted to the ward or stepdown unit and are subsequently transferred to the ICU is zero percent. As Dr. Webster concluded, “It doesn’t get any better than that.”