Myongji Hospital_명지병원, known as the “icon of medical innovation,” has opened the next- generation “Smart ICU” based on IT technology that can suit world-class criteria of infection and critical care management.

The new intensive care unit, which has been in operation since Tuesday, is the next generation ICU with separate single rooms, an optimized isolation room for infection control, an IT-based smart system, and quality control that meets international standards.

It is the first hospital in Korea that has a nationally designated quarantine facility in the intensive care unit, a preemptive measure for the management of critical illness with new infectious diseases such as the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

The new facility adopts a ceiling pendant system for a centralized control which can manage patients remotely. It is also equipped with a smart window system that operates transparently and opaque as needed, ensuring patient safety and privacy, and a monolithic hemodialyzer, a machine that uses dialysis to remove impurities and waste products from the bloodstream before returning the blood to the patient's vein with water and drain pipes.

Myongji Hospital in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, has recently opened its third-generation smart intensive care unit, the first nationally designated state-of-the-art quarantine facility.

In particular, the moving wall system of the ICU, inspired by the movie “Transformers,” was opened to the public. It is a state-of-the-art system that transforms into a complete sound pressure structure, with a gradual closing of doors, rooms, corridors, as well as isolation sound pressure rooms in case of infectious diseases such as MERS.

For the best patient management, a nurse takes care of only two patients, which improved the quality of the intensive care unit and the patient survival. According to a study by the Korean Society of Critical Care Medicine_{중환자의학회}, if one nurse takes care of four patients, the mortality rate for sepsis was 41.6 percent but it falls to 38.75 percent when a nurse takes care of three patients, and to 20 percent when the number of patients for a nurse drops to two.

"The next-generation smart ICU is a type of advanced facility that can meet all of the issues of future healthcare such as infection control, emergency room infrastructure, and intensive care unit management,” said Lee Wang-jun_이왕준, chairman of the Myongji Medical Foundation. “We will improve the quality of medical attention and dedicate to ‘patient-first’ principle through advanced infection management system."

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