The last 18 months has thrown up challenges and opportunities for the healthcare industry and the second wave of COVID19 exposed shortcomings in terms of advice that patients could receive for timely medical advice.

Keeping this in mind, Wipro GE Healthcare’s remote monitoring solution, tele-ICU, along with the centricity high acuity critical care solution (CHA-CC) is tailor-made to connect intensive care units (ICUs) in different locations or within the same building to central sites.

The technology has so far connected 800 beds across several hospitals in India to the hub hospital where highly skilled healthcare professionals can remotely provide advanced consultation and care to their critically ill patients.

The hospitals which have deployed this solution include Apollo Hospitals-Hyderabad, Kainos Hospital-Rohtak and Apex Hospital-Jaipur. Currently, the ICU beds are connected from the States of Jharkhand, Assam, Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

Designed and developed in GE’s John F Welch Technology Center, Bengaluru, tele-ICU works on a hub and spoke model where it enables clinicians to provide a similar level of advanced consultation, care and monitoring to their critically ill patients without having to physically transfer them to a super-speciality hospital.

Dr Shailesh Jhawar, chief intensivist, Apex Hospital, Jaipur said, “From a mere 15 patients a day, now we are managing 80-100 patients, so it enhances the quality of the care that we are giving at least by four to five times. After using the virtual care solution for six months, we noticed that patients being treated at the spoke had improved clinical outcomes as well.”

Additionally, Wipro GE Healthcare in partnership with MedIoTek using CHA-CC and MedloTek’s wearable bands for monitoring of patient vitals enabled 60 home beds to be connected to a central ICU of Saiman Healthcare in Delhi.

“The pandemic has accelerated the need for out-of-box innovations to tide over the crisis at hand. Our engineers understood this need and customized a solution for it. Tele-ICU is part of Wipro GE Healthcare’s response to support healthcare professionals in aiding them to provide quality healthcare in this time of critical need. This solution makes ICU care accessible to rural India and consolidates the efforts of intensivists. It is a smart way of managing and caring for patients across ICUs whether in a single hospital building or spread across locations,” said Amit Mohan, Head of Life Care & LCS Digital Solutions, Wipro GE Healthcare, South Asia.

Amit Mohan, Wipro, GE,