Montreal Jewish General Hospital establishes a “virtual care room” during the fifth wave

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Amid the surge in COVID-19 admissions, the Jewish General Hospital has launched a pilot project to set up a “virtual ward” for up to 50 patients to receive care at home while their vital signs are monitored remotely, according to reports. The Montreal Gazette has been able to know.

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The first patient entered the virtual room on Tuesday and another two on Thursday. Otherwise, these three people would have been hospitalized in the Côte-des-Neiges intensive care institution, but instead they stay at home, and the Jewish general lent them medical equipment that may include portable oxygen tanks.

the pilot project — part of a strategy called “Care Everywhere” — it is believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, although similar initiatives have been launched in the United States and Europe. The goals of the project are to advance telemedicine in Quebec to the next level, improve home care, and reduce hospitalizations in an overburdened health network.

Still, while the project is innovative, it is somewhat experimental, and that is why the Jewish General is using extensive “exclusion criteria” to ensure that truly at-risk patients are not admitted to the virtual ward. Prime Minister François Legault has been briefed on the project and is said to be “ecstatic” at its potential.

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“We have been involved in this digital transformation for quite some time. It preceded the pandemic, but it came to the fore because of the pandemic,” explained Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, executive director of the West-Central Montreal health authority in charge of the Jewish General.

“One of the things we’ve really wanted to do for a while is introduce a virtual care program. Due to the need to release hospital beds urgently, safely — not just to kick people out, to take care of them safely — we accelerate our virtual care program. So we quietly introduced (Tuesday) a virtual care room where we can care for people at home, monitor their vital signs remotely.

“The main reason people are admitted with COVID is because they need oxygen,” Rosenberg added. “So we came up with a way to give them oxygen at home, monitor their usage and monitor their O2 sat (blood oxygen saturation) and everything else that needs to be monitored.”

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Back at the Jewish General, a command center with a dedicated team of doctors receives vital signs from virtual patients every five minutes. At home, patients are hooked up to “special wearable devices that monitor a variety of vital signs in real time,” Rosenberg said.

But what would the command center do if a virtual patient’s health suddenly deteriorated?

“We’ve talked to Urgences-santé, and if someone needs to come back, they’ll bring them to our ER,” Rosenberg replied. “These patients are being monitored 24 hours a day. They are probably getting more control than if they were sitting in the hospital.

“We have developed very strict exclusion criteria about who can be included and who cannot,” he continued. “Our criteria was so strict at the beginning that they couldn’t find a patient initially.”

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The first virtual patient, a woman, is “absolutely excited” to be at home instead of in a crowded hospital with the Omicron variant circulating and doing well, Rosenberg said.

The Jewish General, affiliated with the McGill University medical school, is considered one of the best hospitals not only in Quebec but in all of Canada. It was initially designated as a COVID treatment center, in part, because its Pavilion K was designed with a possible pandemic in mind.

And during the COVID pandemic, the Jewish general has tried new technologies, some with more success than others. For example, the hospital relied on a sophisticated AI program from Israeli software engineers to project COVID-19 admissions during the first wave in 2020. That initiative was deemed a success.

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However, another pilot project involving a smartphone app using facial recognition technology produced mixed results and never got off the ground.

On Thursday, COVID hospitalizations increased by 117 to 2,994 across Quebec. In the Jewish General, 138 patients were hospitalized for COVID, of whom 17 were in the intensive care unit, according to the Ministry of Health. That compares with a record 178 during the first wave.

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