St. Elizabeth Healthcare Shares Remote Inpatient Telemetry Success Story Off-Site Telemetry Services Provide 24 x 7 Oversight of Health System’s At-Risk Cardiac Patients St. Elizabeth Healthcare Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, Benita Anderson, and Director of System TCUs, Jennifer Yost, share the healthcare system’s experience partnering with Hicuity Health for 24 x 7 continuous cardiac monitoring. They detail how their bedside teams and patients have benefited from the constant and consistent surveillance of at-risk patients anywhere in the hospital. Building on a successful five-year tele-ICU partnership with Hicuity Health, St. Elizabeth Healthcare, which serves six facilities across the Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Southeastern Indiana regions, implemented the company’s remote telemetry monitoring (RTM) service in 2018. St. Elizabeth Healthcare chose to integrate Hicuity Health’s RTM service in order to ease the burden on internal resources, particularly on the nursing staff; improve hospital workflow management; and enhance care delivery within the hospital system. This also allowed St. Elizabeth Healthcare to ease the workload for the recruiting, hiring, training, and productivity management of personnel. Benita Anderson noted, “It’s difficult to find quality individuals who can do that job right now. It involves so much training, variability, and experience that it was problematic for us to find staff.”
In addition, the Hicuity Health solution offered the opportunity for the healthcare system to reduce its overall costs. It is expensive to pay for monitor watchers as well as extra management resources to coordinate scheduling and shift changes. “We looked at the cost of trying to keep a monitor watcher on every unit and being able to cover for all the downtime and PTO with a nurse. Especially today with a shortage of nurses, having a nurse at the monitor is not where our people resources needed to focus,” said Anderson. Hicuity Health’s RTM service is a protocolized solution for providing continuous cardiac monitoring. The telemetry service is delivered by trained and certified telemetry technicians located in remote care centers that are operationally equipped to monitor patient data. This approach provides hospitals with 24 x 7 monitoring to continuously track the heart rhythms of their at-risk cardiac patient