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Not long ago, intensive-care nurses at Mercy Medical Center would have to leave a patient’s bedside momentarily to page an on-call doctor if a patient’s condition was worsening.

Now, those nurses can push a red button at the bedside to instantly connect with a new in-hospital center that remotely monitors each intensive-care patient. A two-way video monitor installed at each bed allows the nurse to instantly confer with a doctor and nurse who have been monitoring the patient, using advanced software that can detect even slight changes in the patient’s condition before it becomes an emergency.

An early-warning system of sorts for Mercy’s most critical patients, the new electronic intensive-care unit system, called eICU Connect, enables the hospital to provide an added level of monitoring and video communication for its 54 intensive-care beds. On Jan. 15, Mercy became the first hospital system in Iowa to implement such an interactive electronic system, which is monitored around the clock by a team of doctors and nurses.

Mercy is also at the forefront of bringing the eICU system to hospitals throughout the state. Beginning next week, nurses at the eICU control center at Mercy Medical Center – Des Moines will begin remotely monitoring 24 ICU beds at Mercy Medical Center – Sioux City, with a number of rural hospitals expected to soon follow. Hospitals that are outside Mercy’s network would pay an annual fee on a per-bed basis for the monitoring service. The service will enable smaller hospitals in Iowa to use the leading-edge technology without having to transport their critical-care patients to Des Moines.

“It’s just another service we will provide,” said David Hickman, director of clinical integration for Mercy Health Network, which consists of 11 member hospitals and 26 affiliate hospitals in Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois. “Most all of the hospitals in our network have shown interest in the system.”

With a shortage of intensive-care physicians and nurses both in Iowa and across the country, electronic ICU monitoring has grabbed the attention of hospital officials as they seek to stretch limited staffs. But more important, hospitals that have adopted it have shown they can reduce mortality rates and shorten hospital stays.

“If you reduce the length of stay, you reduce the cost, which we’re all interested in doing,” said Nikki Jarding, Mercy’s eICU director. With the new system, a doctor is present at all times at the eICU center for consultation, she noted. That has already increased the satisfaction of the nursing staff “to have a doctor available to consult at night who’s wide awake,” she said.

The system’s “command center,” which cost Mercy approximately $1.5 million to install at its main campus at 1111 Sixth Ave., consists of three workstations that provide real-time vital signs, laboratory results and other information on each patient. Nurses are assigned to monitor up to 25 patients from each station.

Implementing more of these systems will help address a critical shortage of intensive-care specialists, Hickman said. “There are about 6,000 intensive-care doctors in the country; there’s a need for about 30,000,” he said. “We’re lucky in Des Moines that we have enough intensivists. But in the rest of Iowa, they’re hard to find. By monitoring these hospitals, we can support the doctors’ plan of care while they can get some more sleep.”

Mercy is one of more than 180 U.S. hospitals that have installed an eICU system made by VISICU Inc., a Baltimore-based healthcare information technology company. Among other Midwest hospital systems also using the system are Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, which was one of the first in the country to adopt an eICU three years ago, Advocate Health Care in Chicago and St. Luke’s Health System in St. Louis.

According to 2006 data from 68 hospitals using the system, those hospitals experienced a 22 percent lower mortality rate than the national average for ICU patients. Also, reduced complication rates led to a 15 to 20 percent reduction in length of stay for some of the hospitals’ ICUs.

Mercy’s main competitor, Iowa Health – Des Moines, is currently working with its affiliate hospitals to determine how it will implement an electronic ICU system.

“Our plan is to identify an application and a vendor in 2008 and roll out the new technology in 2009,” said Jennifer Perry, a spokeswoman. Iowa Health – Des Moines operates Iowa Lutheran Hospital, Iowa Methodist Medical Center and Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines, and is constructing the Michael R. Myers Hospital in West Des Moines.

Implementing the eICU has not changed the number of bedside nurses working directly with the patients or their responsibilities, Jarding said. “We’re just there as a second level of support, part of the team,” she said.

Now that Mercy has used the system for a few weeks, “I think it’s going really well,” she said. “The nurses are really enjoying having the extra resource there, especially (to access) a physician at night so they don’t have to leave the bedside to call a physician. They have a physician right there who can give them orders for their patient.”

The two-way monitors also provide an additional level of interaction with patients, Jarding said. “The nurses (who are monitoring) are introducing themselves and letting patients know they’re there to help monitor their vitals and to help if the nurse needs anything. There’s really been pretty good response from the patients we’ve had interactions with.”