Unpacking the emergency room: home care through technology

Long ago, the Jewish General Hospital of Montreal launched a pilot project for remote patient care using technology.

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Currently, health professionals are following four patients in the comfort of their stay, but if all goes well, the project can follow up to fifty patients.

“This project, we’ve been already thinking about and it’s almost an opportunity we’ve given the pandemic to say we’re going to put our shoulder to the wheel and we’re going to get there a little bit more intense. Expected,” explains Francine Dubuis, Executive Vice President at CIUSSS du Center-Ouest-de-l’île de Montreal.

Nurses have continuous access to patients’ vital signs through technology and can seek advice from doctors if they need it.

“A team of nurses and doctors who specialize in this subject has developed a very strict protocol for selecting people. It can be emergency patients, it can be patients who have already been hospitalized and who usually need care, but they can go home,” says the executive vice president. With a virtual follow up.

In the event of complications or deterioration of his condition, the patient is transferred to the hospital to receive appropriate care.

“We’re not going to send home someone who’s really fragile and can make up in the next 24 hours. Later, when the project is more established, we might send people a little different, but these are independent people who have someone at home,” she says.

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