CASE STUDY

Scaling Critical Care to Meet Community Need

When someone needs intensive care, a hospital is the right place for 24/7 support and monitoring by dedicated nurses and providers. But what if there is no local option? When hospitals close or reduce services, entire counties can lose access to ICUs, specialty services, and more.

About Our Anesthesia Group

The Southern Illinois Division of Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS) includes a large hospital in the St. Louis suburbs as well as smaller hospitals in rural counties.

Core Challenges

1. ICU volumes were too low to make full-time physician staffing at the smaller hospitals cost-effective

2. Quality performance measures (including sepsis) were low across all locations.

Integrate acute care across hospital sites

To meet the critical care needs of the range of hospitals and communities, Vituity rolled out a hub-and -spoke model, where the services of the tertiary care hospital become a centralized resource across the region. The intensivist group became a single team, providing onsite and tele-ICU coverage across all four hospitals.

At the same time, thanks to our integrated approach, critical care, hospital medicine, and emergency medicine physicians worked together across hospitals. As a result:

Intensivists were available for patient consults when needed regardless of location.
Participating practices worked as a team. Together they created shared protocols, clinical pathways and developed quality and efficiency goals to improve effectiveness of the approach.

When I visit the emergency department, it feels like an extension of my ICU. I see friends, colleagues, and, most importantly, partners looking out for our sickest patients and each other. In the end, the patient benefits most.

Pablo Echeverria, MD

Critical Care Medical Director

Flexible, scalable services that meet demand, improve quality and reduce costs

Our model was lifesaving during the pandemic when ICU capacity was stretched. In less than a year after implementation, the hospital system saw impressive and immediate results.

As an integrated care team, the intensivists, hospitalists, and emergency physicians were able to rapidly adapt and support the surge in critically ill patients. Because the care team was already fully comfortable with tele-ICU care and consults, the group of dedicated intensivists could effectively manage increased volumes.

Cost savings in critical care staffing.

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All four hospitals in the HSHS Southern Illinois Division continue to offer local high acuity services, benefiting the patient and the community. As healthcare moves to meeting patients when, where, and how they need care, we believe this is the future of critical care.

Partnering to improve patient lives

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