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Telemedicine has been one of the biggest bets in the pandemic. Although the project is not new, it has been key to treating patients in intensive care units in the south of the city.

Eight intensive care units (ICU) have been concentrated in a small ward of Kennedy hospital, totaling 30 beds. They are not physically there, they are distributed between this and the Bosa and Fontibón hospitals, but the monitoring that is done from there is almost the same as that of the personnel who are attending the sick in person.

In the living room there are six televisions. In three of them the patients in the ICU are seen in high definition, in another one accesses their medical records, while in the last two they monitor their vital signs: heart rate, saturation, blood pressure, temperature and the electrocardiogram. “We can request to correct some things, because minute by minute I am seeing everything and in communication with the doctor, the therapist or the nurse,” said Giovanni Rodríguez, chief of anesthesiology at Kennedy hospital.

Your mission is important. Next to him is another anesthesiologist, a cardiologist, an internist and a therapist, who throughout the day are watching each patient assigned to this teleuci. “What we do is give support in places where there is a lack of a doctor with our specialty. Due to the pandemic, more personnel have been demanded, which requires a minimum of four years of preparation, so we have had to divide ourselves into different units. However, through this mechanism what we do is provide timely assistance such as when, for example, medications are needed, the pathology is difficult to manage in the ventilation part or additional support is required in certain circumstances ”, indicated another of the doctors in the room.

They have also served as an alert. Last week they showed that a patient was unemployed and quickly with the staff of the Fontibón hospital not only gave the warning, but also accompanied the entire resuscitation process. “The cameras are high definition and not only do I see their daily evolution, but we can also participate, and in these cases see the cardiac massage and what the staff does. It is as if I were at the head of the bed, the only thing I need is to be there, but from here I see clearly everything that happens, ”explained Rodríguez.

They have had to attend more complicated processes. Outside of participating in decision-making, such as determining who enters or leaves an ICU, supporting the most complex patients, as well as situations in which medicines are lacking or availability in place, other unconventional practices are required , as if the doses must be changed due to drug resistance or an extubation must be prepared.

“During the day a review is spent looking at how the patients are, what they have pending, how they have evolved or if someone is better and we can transfer them to the floor. But specific doubts are also solved and decisions are made about the exams that are being done and what is coming out on a day-to-day basis, ”commented the anesthesiologist.

Although with this mechanism they have been able to support 102 ICUs in the South Subnet, where they require certain specialists, the idea did not arise with the pandemic. Telemedicine has been regulated since 2010, so the project has been structured in recent years. “The pandemic accelerated the need for what we required,” said Rodríguez.

The idea was articulated with the Santa Fe Foundation and with some intensivists and the subnet supported itself with the technological part, that is, with the investment of the cameras, the installation of the monitors and guaranteeing the connection. In addition, they are pioneers and the only ones who are monitoring minute by minute, because in other hospitals, such as the National University, telemedicine spaces have also been opened, but they do not have permanent monitoring.

For now, they are fully dedicated to COVID-19 patients, which is why they have sought to strengthen the group of specialists with more experts in intensive care, but hope is on what they can do next. “We may never have intensivists in San José del Guaviare, but if we bring some people, train them and then install our cameras there, to support them from here, it would be a great advance in telemedicine.”

What is clear is that this is one of the alternatives that the District has found to meet the needs of health personnel in the public network, or at least, in this case, in the South Subnet, especially now that the ICUs reach 93% occupancy, with 2,440 beds occupied and only 197 available, amid the third peak of the pandemic, which according to experts could last another week, increasing the pressure on the entire health system chain in the District .

Faced with what they are doing, the doctors of this teleuci, who are clear that they will not see face to face with the patients to whom they are dedicated on a daily basis, and they will surely not know all the work that was behind it. The final compensation is that through this mechanism they are helping to save more lives and building a path from which medicine in the city cannot be more elusive and with which now it will have a chance to reach all corners of the country. .