Future Now
The IFTF Blog
What does state-of-the-art critical care vs. chronic care look like?
Tomorrow (June 25, 2009), the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (more commonly known as HIMSS) is hosting a webinar entitled, "Ubiquitous Wireless Enables All-Private Room Critical Care Hospital." This struck my interest from a technology standpoint, by it also made me pause to consider the question of how and when the hospital infrastructure in this country will start adapting to meet our growing need for chronic care?
Don't get me wrong. We are always going to need facilities that can provide critial care. That may be one of the things that hospitals do best. And it certainly sounds like the Virginia Commonwealth University Health System's new 275-bed all private room critical care hospital is state-of-the-art. From the webinar abstract:
...a unified wireless infrastructure provides caregivers a virtual link for everything from remote communication of bedside alarms to physician access to the EHR. The session will explore the business and patient care objectives for building the new critical care tower, the challenges of providing safe, high quality patient care in a private room setting, the role of wireless devices & applications to provide efficient & high level of care and the wireless platform considerations/selection to deliver facility-wide wireless services.
I'm just curious about what state-of-the-art chronic care will look like. Some of my colleagues may want to weigh in, or you readers. If you are in the latter category and not a member of the Health Horizons Program, you won't be able to post comments. You can e-mail them to me at vdistler[at]iftf[dot]org and I'll post them for you.