Abstract
Critical care medicine is the specialty that cares for patients with acute life-threatening illnesses where intensivists look after all aspects of patient care. Nevertheless, shortage of physicians and nurses, the relationship between high costs and economic restrictions, and the fact that critical care knowledge is only available at big hospitals puts the system on the edge. In this scenario, telemedicine might provide solutions to improve availability of critical care knowledge where the patient is located, improve relationship between attendants in different institutions and education material for future specialist training. Current information technologies and networking capabilities should be exploited to improve intensivist coverage, advanced alarm systems and to have large critical care databases of critical care signals.
Highlights
In many areas of medicine, physicians can often postpone decisions about patient care until they have been debated in committees; in critical care medicine, physicians must constantly take both general and specific decisions
Healthcare expenditures in the United States increased by 6.9% in the year 2007, reaching 2.3 trillion dollars, which represents 16% of the GNP
Whereas only 10% of patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) require major interventions, 77% are admitted solely for monitoring purposes [29], and ICUs are equipped with devices that can monitor physiological variables of interest
Summary
In many areas of medicine, physicians can often postpone decisions about patient care until they have been debated in committees; in critical care medicine, physicians must constantly take both general and specific decisions. Statistics from the Department of Health of the United Kingdom show that emergency consultations have increased at an annual rate of 6% since 1994 To deal with this growth, diverse strategies have been employed with the aim of optimizing the use of resources. In June 2006, after three years’ work, a commission designated by the United States Institute of Medicine presented the results of a study about the future of medical emergencies [16,17,18]. Their principal recommendations could be summarized in four points:. The system should contain tools to enable the cause of errors and malfunctioning to be determined so that they can be corrected
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