RESEARCH ARTICLE
Telemedicine in Critical Care
Gastón Murias1, Bernat Sales2, Oscar Garcia-Esquirol3, Lluis Blanch*, 4
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 10
Last Page: 16
Publisher ID: TORMJ-3-10
DOI: 10.2174/1874306400903010010
Article History:
Received Date: 22/12/2008Revision Received Date: 2/1/2009
Acceptance Date: 20/1/2009
Electronic publication date: 12/3/2009
Collection year: 2009

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Critical care medicine is the specialty that cares for patients with acute life-threatening illnesses where intensivists look after all aspects of patient care. Nevertheless, shortage of physicians and nurses, the relationship between high costs and economic restrictions, and the fact that critical care knowledge is only available at big hospitals puts the system on the edge. In this scenario, telemedicine might provide solutions to improve availability of critical care knowledge where the patient is located, improve relationship between attendants in different institutions and education material for future specialist training. Current information technologies and networking capabilities should be exploited to improve intensivist coverage, advanced alarm systems and to have large critical care databases of critical care signals.