The hospitals of Camp de Tarragona and Terres de l"Ebre have already begun to deploy a new network to coordinate and integrate critical patient care, with the aim that assistance is the same throughout the territory regardless of the municipality of residence or the center where the patient enters.
The project, named Crític.Cat-Sud, connects the ICUs of Hospital Joan XXIII and Hospital Sant Pau i Santa Tecla of Tarragona, Hospital Sant Joan of Reus, Hospital Verge de la Cinta of Tortosa, the regional hospitals and the Sistema d"Emergències Mèdiques, the SEM. The implementation will be progressive throughout 2026 and the deployment will be subject to quality controls.
The presentation of the model was held on April 9 at the Celler de Vila-seca, at an event with more than 200 attendees. There, the project's operational director, Jaume Estany, argued that the initiative responds to a criterion of equity and highlighted the technical effort behind it.
"Any person who is in critical condition has the same attention" - Jaume Estany, operational director of the project
Connection between ICU and regional hospitals
The network incorporates a communication system similar to a videoconference so that professionals from different centers can talk among themselves, jointly review a patient's tests and observe their physical state in real time through a camera. The forecast is that this tool will replace a part of the information exchange that until now was resolved by phone.
The model seeks to reinforce coordination between large hospitals and regional centers. Maria Bodí, head of the Intensive Care Medicine service at Hospital Joan XXIII in Tarragona, cited Hospital del Vendrell as an example. Until now, when a patient arrived at the emergency room with a critical pathology that required evaluating a transfer, communication was done by call between professionals. With the new system, the aim is to reach a consensus on when a consultation, a follow-up, a transfer, or a return should be activated, although the phone will continue to be used.
"The intention is that a patient who is assisted in any hospital can be assessed, even if there is no intensive care service there, by a specialist and joint decisions are made" - Maria Bodí, head of the Intensive Care Medicine service at Hospital Joan XXIII of Tarragona
Bodí also stressed that the technological tool does not replace the clinical work shared among teams. The approach is that a specialist can intervene in the assessment even if the patient is in a hospital without its own ICU.
Fewer transfers and decisions based on clinical criteria
One of the central objectives of the project is to reduce transfers of critical patients between centers when they are not necessary. Joan Guanyabens, director of the TIC Salut Social Foundation, explained that linking all points of care and all ICUs will allow knowing at all times the situation of these units and facilitating that each patient receives specialized care from the place where they are.
"The idea is to decrease the transfers of patients in critical condition between the centers" - Joan Guanyabens, director of the Fundació TIC Salut Social
Guanyabens insisted that, if a patient needs to be transferred, it will be done, but the decision must respond only to clinical criteria. He also highlighted that sharing all available information about a person in critical condition with the professionals who can intervene in their treatment will allow for coordinated work from the first moment.
Real-time data and artificial intelligence
The system will include a data repository that will allow knowing in real time how the territory's ICUs are, how many patients they attend to, what their needs are, and what treatments they receive. That information base will also serve to introduce changes in protocols.
The project will also incorporate artificial intelligence tools to generate forecasts on the evolution of patients with certain conditions, based on the accumulated experience with previous cases. That predictive capacity should help anticipate clinical decisions and better adjust the response of the healthcare network.
The initiative was first launched in Girona, where the deployment is most advanced. Now, Tarragona and the Terres de l"Ebre are moving forward with an implementation that aims to homogenize the response to the most serious cases and improve coordination between reference hospitals, regional centers, and emergency services throughout southern Catalonia.