ICU innovations is really a quality improvement program or quality improvement platform.

ICU innovations is an educational platform, where MUSC has brought together all of their thought leaders, with respect to care challenges in the ICU setting, and they develop educational platforms and then bring those platforms, into community hospitals.

This is a program we initiated in 2014 as a way to bring multidisciplinary critical care expertise to community hospital ICUs in the state of South Carolina.

And the motivation was the observation that many hospitals don't have critical care expertise due to lack of critical care trained physicians, due to lack of access to certain educational materials that may be available in larger places.

really, due to what can sometimes be a very heterogeneous group of physician providers that are practicing in those intensive care units, So this is a problem that's certainly not confined to critical care medicine.

It's been well shown that really well demonstrated clinical best practices are quite slow to make it into routine patient care.

And so really, we wanted a program that helps expedite getting those known best practices to the patient bedside, in partner hospitals that we were working with in this program.

we have scheduled seminars, where our team here at MUSC travels to the community hospital to conduct roughly two hour seminars on different clinical topics.

We have regular touch base planning calls with our community hospital partners to determine progress and barriers and to try to, like, identify ways that we could either provide more content, more knowledge, just moral support, if that's what they really need to be able to move ahead with the initiatives that they themselves have identified as things that they want to change in their own clinical practice.

What was very important to us as we went about developing it was that it be multidisciplinary, because that's one of the cornerstones of high quality critical care practice.

It's a multidisciplinary practice.

What does that mean?

It's team based care doctors just don't take care of patients.

Nurses just don't take care of patients.

Respiratory therapist, physical therapist, nutritionist in the ICU.

It's a team that takes care of the patient.

And the ICU innovation program recognizes that.

So when we have these educational opportunities, all of these disciplines are represented And we all are on the same page.

We're all learning the best practices with respect to best ventilator management, best sepsis management, best nutritional management, the best motility and mobility management.

50 00:03:09,088 --> 00:03:12,325 The most progress is made when most people are pushing in the same direction?

And what ICU innovation allows us to do is educate people to the best practices and to get us all on the same page.

So we're all pushing in the same direction.

55 00:03:22,402 --> 00:03:25,805 As best practice evolves, you know, it comes from studies and research.

And what you find should be, done and maybe not what you were taught in school.

So working with innovations and them assisting us, we shaped our practice based on best practice, best teachings.

And We did it throughout the team.

Not just physicians, not just bedside nurses, but the rest were therapists, the physical therapists, the dietician lab.

Everybody involved in the care of the patient was involved in innovations in teaching.

66 00:04:01,874 --> 00:04:04,310 Innovations has been a huge asset.

68 00:04:04,510 --> 00:04:08,815 We've had innovations regarding early mobility in our critical care patients, early nutrition to help support these patients recover.

Best practice, about, sedation.

Patients that are critically ill and on a ventilator.

It was a time for us all to collaborate.

The entire team learn together and then bring that back and apply it to our clinical practice to help improve our patient care.

Just because you are in a rural community doesn't mean you can't get high quality best practice ICU care.

And the ICU innovation program is dedicated to making sure that each and every team of providers, regardless of if they're in a downtown, urban or suburban area, or if in a rural hospital like here in Camden, South Carolina, that they have access to the latest and best evidence to treat patients, and then they have the processes and confidence to deliver that care.

Having done the program now for more than ten years, we've really been able to see tangible improvements in implementation of really important clinical, changes that wouldn't have likely occurred without this program.

we also have built wonderful partnerships with health care workers, really across the state of South Carolina and have found that that's really very mutually rewarding on both sides.