Attention medical equipment designers

Monday, April 9, 2001

Todd Dorman, an M.D. and director of the adult critical care medicine division at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, points out that there are currently less than 10,000 intensive care teams in the US, but 35,000 to 40,000 are needed for sufficiently staffing in the nation's intensive care units.

Dorman authored a paper suggesting that telemedicine may provide a way of stretching the expertise of existing intensivists in the future. He conducted a telemedicine study using cameras and data transmission equipment that showed that, with proper monitoring, death rates dropped 68% and complications dropped 50%.

The lack of medical personnel and the potential cost savings associated with remote monitoring sends a message to medical equipment designers that their products will need to be Internet-ready in coming years, according to Dorman. "Better compression technology is needed so that bigger files can be transferred quicker without just increasing bandwidth," he says. "Better transfer protocols are needed so that once 20 to 25% of a given bandwidth is utilized, there should not be degradation of performance." For more information, visit www.med.jhu.edu.