Bring The Hospital ER Into The Home, Eliminating Surge Capacity.
Gold Coast, AUSTRALIA, April 8, 2020 – inTechnology Distribution, Australia’s leading Value Added Distributor announced that Caretaker Medical, the global leader in Remote Wireless Patient Monitoring, is the technology behind Australia’s first ‘virtual hospital’, and will be used to monitor COVID-19 patients in their homes, to help reduce the surge capacity on the Australian healthcare system.
Australia’s’ first virtual hospital program has been the brainchild of Professor Rod McClure, Dean of Medicine at the University of New England, and public health expert. Professor McClure spent several years as a director at the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and has worked with similar virtual hospitals in America.
“With the increasing pressure on hospital emergency and ICU departments and their front-line staff, we needed a way to address this and we needed to take action now”. “This has become an issue which has become global overnight, we need to access services when patients are in isolation,” he said. “The systems that support virtual access to services are not there, however the technology is and now we are deploying it.” Professor McClure said,
“The Caretaker devices will be used to monitor patients in their homes who have moderate symptoms of the virus, and will continuously track their vital signs, including heart rate, temperature, oxygen saturation, beat-by-beat blood pressure and breathing”, Professor McClure, said. “A team of doctors, supported by artificial intelligence technology, will continuously monitor their status, and if their conditions worsen, we will bring them into the hospital for emergency care”, he concluded.
“With Caretaker’s ability to monitor patients remotely, and the forward thinking from Professor McClure to help Australia with this global pandemic, we will not only be able to reduce surge capacity, we will also help to protect clinicians and medical staff by allowing them to remain safely distanced from COVID-19 patients, while continuously observing vital signs’ said Jeff Pompeo President and CEO of Caretaker Medical.
“Beat by Beat Blood Pressure, Respiration Rate and other vitals are early indications of patient deterioration, and the Caretaker device triggers early intervention that save lives”. “Caretaker brings “ICU Quality” patient data to all points of care viewable from anywhere in the world without restricting patient mobility”, Jeff concluded.
“It’s a great privilege to be representing a vendor that not only provides world class technology, they are also at the forefront of the battle against this horrible disease that has affected so many across the world”, said Mark Winter, Chief Executive Officer at inTechnology Distribution.
Professor McClure had been refining his idea for years as a way of providing better healthcare to regional areas. But the sudden need to care for potentially thousands of coronavirus patients – overwhelming hospitals across the nation – has led him to roll the project out now with full support of the University of New England.
More Virtual hospitals are expected to be rolled out across Australia, as Australia’s healthcare system braces for an enormous surge of coronavirus patients, potentially overwhelming hospital capacity. It is clear that there is an urgent need to find safe ways to keep non critically ill patients out of hospital and in the comfort of their own home.