Sutter Health’s eICU® Honored

Awarded "Most Innovative Approach to Health Care Delivery"

SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 12, 2007 - Sutter Health's electronic intensive care unit monitoring system, which brings additional lifesaving resources to the bedsides of critically ill hospital patients, received an award for the most innovative approach to health care delivery from the Adaptive Business Leaders Organization (ABL). The ABL consists of leaders from respected health care and technology companies who share and advance best business practice approaches. Sutter Health's eICU® was recognized for transforming and extending intensive unit care for patients and for helping to hold the line on rising health care costs.

In February, Sutter Health announced that it had completed the expansion of the eICU® within its not-for-profit health care network in Northern California, bringing the total number of hospital beds being monitored to 359.

"In 2003, Sutter Health made a promise to our caregivers and patients – to further advance quality in health care and patient safety through the use of advanced technologies," said Gordon Hunt, M.D., chief medical officer for Sutter Health. "Three years later we not only have completed our aggressive expansion timeline, but we have fundamentally transformed how ICU care is delivered. We are proud that our commitment has been recognized by the ABL."

Sutter Health was the first health care organization on the West Coast to use this advanced technology and the first health network in the Western United States to bring online two eICU® centers for constant monitoring of critically ill patients. Through early warning software and advanced video and remote monitoring, the eICU® system allows intensivists, which are physicians that specialize in critical care, and specially trained nurses in the Sutter Health network to provide an additional layer of monitoring for these patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Patients are monitored via two centrally located "hubs" in Sacramento and San Francisco.

Since the eICU technology was adopted, physicians have recognized improvements in patient care. In one hospital example, ICU mortality is down more than 30 percent.

Across the nation, eICU® technology from Baltimore, Md.-based VISICU, Inc. is installed or is being installed at only 34 health systems.

Sutter Health is the only hospital system in California with eICU technology and on the West Coast, was the first to connect a rural hospital to an eICU® system. One of Sutter's eICU® hubs is monitoring patients at Sutter Coast Hospital – more than 425 miles away.

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Contact
Karen Garner
Sutter Health
(916) 286-8297 | garnerk@sutterhealth.org