The Corona pandemic is a clear demonstration of the need for an alternative to face-to-face medicine. This demand makes telemedicine the tool of choice. In the preliminary stage of the Virtual Hospital North Rhine-Westphalia (VKh), tele-intensive care consultation services have contributed to both a benefit in terms of care and a benefit for individual patients. The task now is to roll out and use digitally-supported intensive-care networks across the board, including throughout Europe. The goal of telemedicine is to ensure comprehensive patient care - also across sector boundaries of the healthcare system - and to improve quality. Tele-intensive care is already an evidence-based added value and addresses current and future challenges such as resource shortage and citizen-centered care. The Virtual Hospital NRW is a telemedical network structure that is unique in Germany. It provides telemedical services from expert centers in a quality-assured and comprehensive manner for general hospitals as well as for outpatient players. Telemedical services help to overcome rigid sector boundaries and to optimize treatment processes. As a result, service-differentiated care networks are goal-oriented. The medium-term perspective could be cross-border network structures. Medical expertise and also intensive care data, both from care and research, could thus be used throughout Europe. In October 2021, the Aachen Expert Center reported on its first 112 telemedically co-managed COVID-19 patients as part of the preliminary stage of the virtual hospital. With a lethality rate of 34.2% in the group of ventilated severely ill COVID-19 patients and a transfer rate of 8%, high-quality care close to the patient's home was achieved through tele-intensive medical consultation services.
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