Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth monitors about 22,000 hospital beds with AI out of its 4,000-square-foot virtual care center that has become an industry leader.
The hub facilitates about 16 virtual care service lines -- from nursing to overnight hospitalists to hospice -- but virtual surveillance has become perhaps the most consequential, an executive told Becker's.
Three or four nurses, with the help of AI embedded in the Epic EHR and in-room cameras, virtually monitor med-surg and step-down beds across the 14 hospital beds for signs of patient sepsis or deterioration.
"It's reduced our mortality significantly across our system and had a very positive impact on patient lives and augmenting our front-line nursing," said Amy Hassell, MSN, RN, chief nursing officer of the UCHealth Virtual Health Center. "It's probably our largest impact [program], both from a quality standpoint ... and so we can intervene earlier."
UCHealth opened its virtual care command center in 2018 to serve its geographically diverse patient base, who are located anywhere from cities to rural, mountainous areas. The health system most recently launched virtual primary care and plans to facilitate nearly 50,000 virtual urgent care visits this year.
Other health systems such as Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health and Sayre, Pa.-based Guthrie Clinic have turned to UCHealth for advice as they look to set up similar virtual care centers. About 450 employees are based at the Colorado facility, while the virtual providers often work from home.
"What's different about our command center is the robustness," Ms. Hassell said. "Some people will have a virtual urgent care; some people will have a virtual ICU; some people have certain pieces of the program, like telesitting. The fact that they're centralized is novel, and that we have it from inpatient to outpatient, all under our umbrella."
The virtual health center also enables more patients to be cared for at home, via remote patient monitoring and a hospital-to-home program. For instance, the program has helped reduce at-home diabetes patients' hemoglobin a1c levels.
Having such a robust virtual health center also makes it easier for UCHealth to scale emerging technologies like AI, Ms. Hassell said.
A coming offering will be virtual "transitions of care," which will help guide discharged patients as they seek all their follow-up care virtually. Ms. Hassell called this the "holy grail of what needs to be fixed in healthcare."
"We're working with our care management partners, who are amazing, and then with our hospitals who are actively discharging the patients and our throughput folks who are in charge of one-week discharge patients," she said. "It's a big collaboration, and it's hard to sync up all the teams, but we're going to try this virtually."