Skip to main content

Posts

Omnicure alleviates staffing shortages

According to a recent US News & Word Report article , an estimated 1.5 million healthcare jobs were lost in the first two months of COVID-19 as the country raced to curb the novel coronavirus by temporarily closing clinics and restricting non-emergency services at U.S. hospitals. This marked the start of the worst healthcare staffing crisis the United States has seen. While some returned to the workforce, others left permanently, creating a vacuum at a time of especially high demand. As time passed, many workers chose early retirement due to the high stress of the situation, and others chose to work shorter hours in outpatient settings, thus creating a lack of staffing, especially in ICU and inpatient settings. Along with this, prices for contracted labor, travel nurses, and locum tenens physicians have increased across the board, especially in areas with low accessibility. The need for healthcare professionals is at an all time high across the country as we continue to battle the
Recent posts

Beyond the Bunker

A Decentralized Model for Tele-Critical Care For the entire history of critical care telemedicine, the practice of tele-ICU has been primarily associated with central command centers. Central command centers, also referred to as bunkers or hubs, link intensivists and other personnel to multiple hospitals so that a relatively small number of critical care physicians can oversee the care of a large number of ICU patients. Capital costs of construction, installation, and training for a new command center range from $6 million to $8 million . At a time when healthcare costs must be minimized, reconsidering the value of central command centers is necessary. In numerous studies , tele-ICU has shown to improve patient outcomes and decrease mortality as well as ICU length of stay. Tele-ICU has clearly shown value in keeping patients closer to home, allowing smaller hospitals to treat high-acuity situations. So the question is, how key is a central command center to an effective tele-ICU progr

Tele-ICU Cost Benefit Analysis

The CEO of Omnicure, Sanjay Subramanian, MD , has a great deal of tele-ICU experience. His experience and leadership in critical care medicine have given him insight into cost and revenue centers in tele-ICU. As the prohibitive costs of legacy tele-ICU systems present a significant barrier, a primary motive of Omnicure is to provide a low-cost telemedicine ICU service. In the 2019 publication, Telemedicine in the ICU [1], Sanjay co-authors a chapter titled “Cost Benefit Analysis of Implementing Telemedicine in the ICU.” Costs of tele-ICU are broken down into the following categories: Hardware Fixed mounted cameras in patient rooms Cabling for cameras Desktop computers and multiple monitors for remote physician/nursing workstations T1 lines to assure connectivity Software  Staffing costs The chapter details the maintenance and support costs of hardware, as well as the staffing support of tele-ICU command centers. The hardware and IT costs are quite significant. For example, the hardwar

Innovating Critical Care

Omnicure was founded to innovate the delivery of critical care. Almost 3 years ago our team banded together to create an intuitive, simple, and mobile-friendly solution to provide tele-critical care with no hardware costs for the hospital. Our primary motives? The belief that healthcare as a whole can be improved through efficient allocation of physician resources. The commitment to provide critical care expertise to settings without intensivists. Whether that is a Critical Access Hospital with a small ICU, or an ED where high-acuity patients wait to be transferred to a hospital bed, we set out to create a model that enabled bedside providers to easily connect with intensivists. Sanjay Subramanian , a critical care physician in St. Louis, experienced the inefficiencies of legacy tele-ICU systems and considered the limitations. He saw an opportunity to make a positive change. Having previously practiced in Seattle, Sanjay reconnected with old friends and colleagues including Paramesh Va