For the second year in a row Gian Cavallini, Advanced ICU Care’s vice president of strategy and development, presented at the annual Connect2Care Philips User Summit in Los Angeles. Cavallini’s presentation, “Adapting for Growth: Telecare Implementation Models,” discussed how acute care telemedicine services, and tele-ICU specifically, are now attainable for all hospitals, regardless of size, operational skills, technical capacity, and intensivist staffing resources.
In his session Cavallini highlighted four primary models through which a hospital or system can acquire a telemedicine capability, detailing the strengths and challenges associated with each model.
- Build/Buy is a fully customizable model, giving the hospital control over – and responsibility for – all aspects of clinical and operational delivery. This model faces the challenges of high costs, complex implementation, the need for internal system expertise, and significant staffing and training. A key challenge is that it fails to insulate against staffing variability arising from intensivist or nurse hiring challenges or unanticipated staff departures.
- CaaS (Care as a Service) is a turnkey solution for a hospital, achieved by contracting for care with a partner provider such as Advanced ICU Care and focused on an emphasis on integration and collaboration, which enables access to scalable staffing by clinical experts and best practices. Challenges arise from a potential perception of “outsourcing” care and in establishing collaborative processes and communication protocols.
- Managed Service models utilize internal clinician staffing and leverage a partner’s operational expertise and infrastructure. This model is typically better suited for larger hospitals and systems with an adequate supply of critical care staff and a desire to utilized existing technical and operational expertise. The approach involves the coordinated management of internal and external capabilities across multiple parties, and internal staffing is still reliant upon a stable, sufficient supply of intensivists.
- Hybrid models are custom-developed combinations of other solutions designed to draw on the respective strengths of an organization and allow for variability.
Advanced ICU Care is the nation’s leading partner to hospitals in providing comprehensive Care as a Service support and currently provides intensivist-directed tele-ICU care to over 65 hospitals nationwide. The company also offers Managed Service and Hybrid solutions to hospitals.
To learn more, Gian Cavallini’s complete presentation from Connect2Care 2017 is available here.
