Mercy the sixth largest Catholic Health System based in St. Louis serves more than 3 million people annually spanning four states is transforming patient care through telehealth. Mercy SafeWatch, is the largest single-hub TeleICU in the country that enables specialists to continually monitor critical patient data across 15 hospitals and interact via video communication with on-site medical teams and patients.
Vidyo’s visual communications technology is integrated into Mercy’s central TeleICU command center in St. Louis which also supports other critical care telemedicine services at Mercy such as telestroke, telecardiology, and teleperinatal.
Thomas Hale, MD, Executive Medical Director of Telehealth Services at Mercy explained that one of the biggest problems healthcare facilities are facing across the U.S is that although there isn’t adequate access to healthcare with the new technology, the health system is now able to reach those who need us the most, when they need us, and wherever they are.”
With the integration of Vidyo and Philips eCare Manager, SafeWatch is able to provide 24/7 vigilance of critically ill patients. So far, over 450 Philips TeleICU monitored beds have been equipped with Vidyo enabling the health system’s critical care doctors and nurses to communicate with ICU patients, their families, and with bedside healthcare staff via a central command center. According to Wendy Deibert, Vice President of Telehealth Services at Mercy, “The health system expects to expand the use of Vidyo to even more beds and applications.”
The VidyoWorks platform allows healthcare providers to deploy HD, low latency Vidyo for healthcare anywhere that an exam or consultations needs to take place. The platform comes with VidyoRoom systems to use for conferences or auditorium events, desktop endpoints for medical carts, and bedside use in hospital emergency rooms, operating rooms, or clinics.
Ofer Shapiro, Vidyo’s CEO and Co-Founder reports “Mercy by using Vidyo, is revolutionizing healthcare and making programs such as SafeWatch possible with scalable, cost-effective, visual communication that leverages the public internet and existing general purpose IP networks. Healthcare practitioners are now able to rely on secure, encrypted remote doctor-patient and doctor to doctor interactions that are as close to face-to-face consultations as you can get.”
Mercy is starting construction on the first virtual care center in the U.S to be located in Chesterfield Missouri opening in 2015 and will accommodate nearly 300 physicians, nurses, specialists, researchers and support staff.
The new facility will have a Safe@Watch eICU, telestroke program, telesepsis program where Mercy’s EHR automatically able to search for more than 800 warning signs, teleradiology, telepathology, Nurse-on-Call, and Home monitoring able to monitor more than 1,000 patients diagnoses with CHF.
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