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Baltimore, Nov. 9, 2006 — VISICU, Inc. (NASDAQ:EICU) today announces the extension of the eICU Program to support the care of critically ill patients outside the intensive care unit. Through the use of mobile audio-visual technology, including the new eCareMobileTM unit, eICU clinicians now support the evaluation and care of patients on medical surgical floors, emergency departments, step down units, and post-anesthesia care units.

At Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, DE, eICU clinicians support the Emergency Department, which is the 20th busiest in the country and includes the state's only Level 1 trauma center. "Many of the patients we see in the Emergency Department are critically ill," says Marc T. Zubrow, MD, eICU Medical Director, Christiana Care. "To ensure these patients receive optimum care, intensivist physicians and nurses in the eICU center partner with our Emergency Department to implement therapies such as early goal-directed sepsis care, tight blood glucose control and normalized blood pressures in neurologic patients while the patient is still in the emergency department. This partnership has been positive and both the eICU and Emergency Department staff are enthusiastic regarding the enhanced level of care."

Parkview Health in Fort Wayne, IN has incorporated its eICU physician into their five hospitals' rapid response teams using mobile technology. "In the United States, most rapid response teams attend to a patient who is in trouble on the hospital's medical surgical floor by sending an ICU nurse and respiratory therapist," says Brian Youn, MD, eICU Medical Director, Parkview Health. "While this type of rapid response team has been shown to improve clinical outcomes, we wanted to improve the effectiveness of the team by adding a critical care physician from the eICU center. Incorporating the eICU intensivist has led to a 32% reduction in floor-based cardiac arrests and overwhelming nurse satisfaction."

With the introduction of the new mobile technology, eICU clinicians can now effectively reach critically ill patients in any hospital department. "We are very excited about enabling health systems to add intensivists to the care team for all critically ill patients regardless of location," says Brian Rosenfeld, MD, Executive Vice-President and Chief Medical Officer, VISICU. "eCareMobile is opening up a new standard of care for both large and small hospitals."

Source: VISICU