Telemedicine Mitigates Risk For Treating Ebola Patient
By Karla Paris
Biocontainment Patient Care Unit at the Nebraska Medical Center mitigates the risks associated with Ebola while it treats Massachusetts physician who contracted disease in Liberia.
Treating highly-contagious diseases like Ebola is extremely difficult. Figuring out how to treat the patient without risking the spread of the disease is even worse. A Nebraska medical center has found a way to handle this treatment utilizing telemedicine as a viable way to deliver care in an acute setting.
The 10-year old Biocontainment Patient Care Unit at the Nebraska Medical Center is helping to treat Dr. Richard Sacra, the Massachusetts physician who contracted Ebola in Liberia where he worked in child delivery.
The Biocontainment Patient Care Unit at The Nebraska Medical Center is using Vidyo’s video conferencing platform for the purpose of connecting family members, physicians, and nurses with Dr. Sacra as his treatment continues in the isolation unit at the Center, the largest facility of its kind in the U.S.
Vidyo provides an HD video conferencing portfolio for universal visual communication from any end point, over any network without requiring expensive network upgrades. The VidyoRoute architecture delivers low-latency HD-quality multipoint video conferencing over an IP network to any end point, and each Vidyo video communication solution is built so it is fully customizable and easy to integrate.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control commissioned the Nebraska Biocontainment Patient Care Unit in 2005. It is a joint project involving The Nebraska Medical Center, Nebraska Health and Human Services, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center. It was designed to provide the first line of treatment for people affected by bio terrorism or extremely infectious naturally occurring diseases.
The unit is equipped to safely care for anyone exposed to a highly contagious and dangerous disease. Early isolation of an infected patient is essential - buying time for public health officials and providing the chance to either stop an outbreak - or help to contain one.
The Nebraska Biocontainment Patient Care Unit has ten beds and can receive patients from anywhere in the country; it is equipped with many safety features. Examples include special air handling systems to ensure that micro-organisms do not spread beyond the patient rooms, with high level filtration and ultraviolet light for additional protection.
SOURCE: Reuters