The Westchester Medical Center Health (WMCHealth) Network works with telemedicine https://www.westchestermedicalcenter.com. WMCHealth a 1,700 bed healthcare system headquartered in Valhalla New York consists of ten hospitals across 6,200 square miles of the Hudson Valley.
WMCHealth provides the Valley region with advanced medical care serving more than 3.5 million people. WMCHealth’s ICU eHealth telemedicine program provides 24/7 care to more than 100 ICU patients on hospital campuses across the Hudson Valley.
WMCHealth has established a 5,500 square foot eHealth Center with 20 multimedia stations equipped with telehealth patient monitoring technologies and software. The medical staff is able to monitor more than 100 patients in eight intensive care units from the eHealth Center.
The medical staff can obtain vital signs, medications, blood test results, x-rays, and other information monitored from the bedside which is then shared with the eHealth control center by high speed data lines. The team also has powerful software that continuously analyzes the information and can alert the teams about possible problems.
The system works by first having the camera turn on in the patient’s room, at that time, a member of the eICU team will appear on the monitor and then the healthcare team can begin to interact with eICU doctors and nurses.
The medical center has also expanded their telemedicine program to include a teletrauma service at the network’s Kingston and Margaretville hospitals to enable immediate care for traumatic injuries.
The teletrauma program connects providers at Kingston and Margaretville hospitals with advanced care trauma specialists at WMCHealth’s Westchester Medical Center and Children’s Hospital in Valhalla.
Emergency department physicians or other acute care clinicians in Kingston or Margaretville can initiate a video connection with the trauma team in Valhalla. The remote trauma team can advise on the severity of the patient’s condition and determine with the local team whether the patient should be treated in place, transferred to the Westchester Medical Center, or be transferred elsewhere.
So far, aside from the eICU and eTrauma telemedicine efforts, other telemedicine services are ePsychiatry, eStroke, eDermatology, and also the use of mobile ICUs in network ambulances.