E-Paper
Hospitals eye electronic ICUs as next growth area
NEW DELHI: Sixty-year-old Hari Prasad (name changed), on life-support system in a hospital in Amritsar, was under surveillance via an electronic intensive care unit
NEW DELHI: Sixty-year-old Hari Prasad (name changed), on life-support system in a hospital in Amritsar, was under surveillance via an electronic intensive care unit (eICU).
A doctor monitoring the setup at Delhi-based Fortis got an alert when Prasad’s oxygen levels started to go down.
“It was found that though the set oxygen on ventilator was 100%, just 21% was getting delivered,” said Sandeep Dewan, director at Fortis’s eICU initiative, Critinext.
eICU runs on the technology between the command centre, usually a reputed hospital in a metro with good infrastructure, and the patient’s bed, usually in a small hospital in a remote area. It allows 24-hour flow of vital data, such as pulse rate, temperature and heartbeat, apart from a connected monitor, ventilator and audiovisual technology that helps raise the alarm (as in Prasad’s case) and conduct emergency procedures, apart from bring in specialists for examination.
Lack of expertise in handling intensive-care cases and shortage of specialists are leading to a rise in eICUs. Apollo, for instance, is monitoring 100 beds across India, and plans to hike this to 1,000 over three years.
Fortis monitors patients even in Bangladesh.
Both claim an average occupancy of 85% for eICU beds. “There are 70,000 eICU beds across India, which cater to 5 million patients per year,” said Pankaj Gautam, head for eACCESS at Apollo Hospitals, which employs over 700 critical-care doctors.
Smaller hospitals in metros are also exploring options of taking up eICUs. “eICU is a state-of-the-art technology for smaller towns, since super specialists are not always present to monitor critical cases due to road or airport inaccessibility,” said Pinky Yadav, medical superintendent at Delhi-based Sri Balaji Action Medical Institute.
Hospitals charge between Rs 700 to Rs 2,000 a day to monitor a patient via eICUs, with revenues shared between hospitals and companies such as General Electric, Siemens and Philips which developed the tracking technology.
Industry estimates put the size of the Indian private hospital market at $55 billion.
