GEISINGER MEDICAL CENTER -- Not all intensive care units are built the same and Geisinger officials wanted to better specialize the ICUs at their facility near Danville.
They showed us one ICU that just opened last week and demonstrated some of the improvements there.
"We were always able to take care of critically ill patients, we just had our patients in multiple different units. So now we have one area we're able to concentrate on taking care of injured patients," said Dr. Denise Torres, the trauma medical director for the Geisinger Health System.
She met us in a newly refurbished room at the hospital's new trauma intensive care unit near Danville.
There are now four dedicated spaces for intensive care patients: trauma, medical-surgical, cardiovascular, and neuroscience.
Treating trauma, she explains, presents a different set of challenges.
"Because trauma was never expected, this is all very new for patients, couldn't be anticipated. Families have struggles, too, we also have to support families as well," said Dr. Torres.
Colby Faust is the operations manager for the trauma ICU.
"We went from 42 beds that you could have a patient anywhere except cardiovascular. We always had a cardiovascular ICU, but we added 14 beds and we've tried to aggregate patients based on specialty," Faust said.
He showed us one of the newest features he and other registered nurses use on the floor: the electronic or eICU, a second set of eyes on critically injured patients.
With a push of the red button, cameras are able to move and up pops Kathleen Jones, a registered nurse at a control center a few miles away on Woodbine Lane.
"If a bedside nurse goes out of the room and needs us to watch the patient, we can camera in and talk to the patient, calm them down," Jones explained. "If we're changing a rate on a medication in an IV, that's a good example, they can camera in, look at the pump, and say, 'yep, that's it.' You see the computer mouse move and someone's typing."
The eICU is staffed with three nurses on each shift, plus a doctor at night.
Faust says their expertise, in addition to staff on the floor, only benefits workflow in a wing where they need to expect the unexpected.
The eICU works to monitor the new trauma ICU at Geisinger as well as nine other floors all throughout the system, including ICU floors at Geisinger Wyoming Valley near Wilkes-Barre, Geisinger-CMC in Scranton, Evangelical in Lewisburg, Bloomsburg, and Lewistown.