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 The oxygen flow to a 67-year-old patient had stopped when no
critical care doctors were present in a hospital in the northern
city of Amritsar.
But the doctor in the New Delhi centre run by Fortis Healthcare
quickly issued a set of instructions and stopped the patient from
suffering brain damage or death, the Indian hospital chain said in
an account of the episode.
India's top private hospitals, seizing on a shortage of
critical-care doctors, are expanding into the remote management of
intensive care units around the country and, starting this month, in
neighbouring Bangladesh too.
India has seven doctors for every 10,000 people, half the global
average, according to the World Health Organization. Data from the
Indian Medical Association shows the country needs more than 50,000
critical care specialists, but has just 8,350.
Such a shortage of doctors means small facilities in India's $55
billion private hospital market are ill equipped to provide critical
care even as numbers seeking private healthcare rise because the
public health system is in even worse shape.
India's largest healthcare chain, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, and
Fortis will this year expand their network of electronic intensive
care units (eICUs), scaling up operations thanks to advances in
communications technology.
"We want to leverage (doctors) using technology," said K. Hari
Prasad, head of hospitals business at Apollo that employs more than
700 critical care doctors.
Apollo, which monitors 200 patients in six states from its only eICU
in Hyderabad city, will open three new centres to track 1,000 more
patients. Prasad said he is also in talks to extend the service to
government hospitals.
Fortis will start remote monitoring of intensive care patients in
the Bangladeshi city of Khulna this week, its first such
cross-border operation. The hospital chain tracks 350 patients from
its New Delhi centre but will start two more eICUs by mid-2017.
Jayant Singh, director of healthcare at Frost & Sullivan India, a
consultancy, estimates that eICUs are boosting industry revenues by
$220 million a year by giving smaller hospitals the ability to treat
critical patients at the hands of top flight intensive-care
specialists, even if they are in another city.
India's eICU beds will expand by 15-20 percent each year from about
3,000 now, Singh said.
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SAVING LIVES
With multiple computer screens inside these high-tech eICUs, doctors
suggest treatment procedures after assessing medical history and
real-time heart rate charts of patients fighting for their lives in
distant facilities.
Doctors recently saved a 30-year-old pregnant woman in a hospital in
the southern city of Warangal after her heart stopped beating,
assisting a resident doctor not specialised in intensive care to
carry out chest compressions through a video link.
"We save about 25 lives a month," said Shamit Gupta, medical
director at Fortis' eICU unit.
Hospitals charge between $10 and $30 a day to virtually monitor a
patient from their eICUs, with revenues shared between hospitals and
companies such as General Electric and Philips that have developed
the tracking software.
That comes on top of standard critical care costs of about $200 a
day in a small city hospital.
At that price, eICUs do little to address concerns of millions of
India's poor patients who often share beds or wait for days to gain
admission to a public hospital.
"This technology basically is not bridging the gap between the poor
and the rich, but increasing access to specialized healthcare for
those who can afford it," Frost & Sullivan's Singh said.
(Reporting by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani, Robert
Birsel)
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