Intermountain Expands its In-Patient Remote Monitoring Program

The health system is using a $100,000 grant from Intel to purchase 70 new cameras and microphones, which will be placed in rooms in hospitals throughout Utah and allow care providers in Salt Lake City to monitor and communicate with patients.

Intermountain Healthcare is using a $100,000 grant from Intel to expand a remote patient monitoring program inside its hospitals.

The Salt Lake City-based health system is using the money to purchase 70 camera and microphone units, which will be posted in in-patient rooms in Intermountain hospitals throughout the state. The video feed is monitored by clinical staff in Salt Lake City, giving those smaller, rural hospital an extra set of eyes and ears and an on-demand link to providers in an emergency.

The Patient Safety Monitoring (PSM) program was launched in 2017, with a goal of remotely monitoring patients and helping smaller hospitals facing staffing issues. The program has helped the health system monitor more than 9,500 patients for more than 1.4 million hours.

Aside from monitoring for falls and other emergencies, the program enables patients to communicate with care providers on-demand. It proved especially useful during the pandemic, allowing providers to monitor patients in isolation and reducing room visits. The platform allows one clinical staff member to monitor a dozen rooms at the same time.

“While this pandemic has been taxing on both parties, it is gratifying that there are ways to help alleviate the burdens of the pandemic one way or another to these populations,” Andrew Davis, project lead for Patient Safety Monitoring at Intermountain Healthcare, said in a press release. “We are always strategizing and finding ways to improve safety and this grant helps fulfill that.”

While some healthcare organizations were using RPM and telemedicine technology prior to the pandemic, COVID-19 created a surge of intertest in in-patient virtual care platforms, including audio-visual communications and digital health devices that capture patient information and send it to care providers in another location, such as the nurses’ station.

Healthcare leaders are now looking to adapt those platforms for use after the pandemic, with new tools and technology that increase monitoring and communications capabilities and allow providers to keep a better eye on patients in the hospital.