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More hospitals are using remote critical-care doctors as they struggle with costs. Yet patient care can suffer when intensive care units are run by a physician on a screen rather than one at the bedside.
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My colleague Alana Semuels investigated the teleICU trend in her new feature for TIME. “I first became interested in teleICUs after learning about the case of Conor Hylton, a dental student who died in a teleICU in 2024,” Alana told me. “I soon learned that this controversial model is proliferating across the U.S.—and that patients can’t typically tell whether the hospital they’re about to visit uses remote or in-person care at the ICU overnight.”
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TODAY’S TOPICS
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BIG NUMBER
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$7.7 billion
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That’s how much Americans over 60 lost to cyber crimes in 2025, according to the FBI—a 34% increase over the previous year.
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Phishing—when people are prompted to give up passwords and personal information via messages that look like they’re from trusted sources—is a common tactic, and a new study, which I covered for TIME, finds that even mild sleep deprivation makes people more vulnerable to it.
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Read the full story here.
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A GOOD READ
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Inside the troubling rise of teleICUs
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Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Pexels, Arafat Uddin via Canva)
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It was the middle of the night in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Island Hospital in Anacortes, Wash., and a patient was hallucinating and in withdrawal from alcohol. The Ativan he’d been given wasn’t enough to lower his heart rate, and Joyce Selph, a longtime nurse, was called over to assist.
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The protocol, she knew, was to call the attending physician and figure out next steps, but there was a problem. The hospital used a teleICU model, in which doctors staffed the ICU during the day, but only remote doctors were available overnight, via computer screen. Selph and the other nurses had tried to reach the teleICU doctor, but no one answered the calls.
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There was no one else to ask, and the patient was rapidly deteriorating. So Selph, who had been a nurse for more than 30 years, did what she assumed a doctor would do; she started the patient on Precedex, a medication that can help sedate a patient.
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Giving medication without a doctor’s orders risked her license, Selph knew, but not doing anything risked the patient’s life. The patient survived. Selph was so disturbed by the incident that she complained to her nursing supervisors and to the hospital’s administration that having a doctor on screen rather than in person was bad policy, but they decided to keep it for financial reasons, she says.
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Soon after, Selph quit her job at Island Hospital, she says, because she felt that the teleICU was endangering patients’ safety and making her practice outside of her scope.
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“They did it as a cost-saving measure because they were having trouble getting hospitalists to want to be there,” Selph says. “But I felt very strongly that it was unsafe.” (Island Health said, in a statement to TIME, that it launched a teleICU program in 2021 to strengthen the level of critical care available in its rural community. It has used a vendor to run the program, the spokeswoman said, and “any technical challenges that have arisen have been addressed directly with [the vendor] to ensure continued safe, effective patient care.”)
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More hospitals are implementing teleICUs, especially overnight, as they struggle to recruit enough providers while keeping costs low. Having a remote physician who can staff multiple hospital ICUs at once can keep ICUs open and revenue coming in, even in the midst of an ongoing shortage of doctors. Though the model was initially pitched as a way to help rural systems deploy experts at all hours, it is frequently used in more urban and suburban areas as well. One 2025 paper surveyed 574 adult ICUs across the country and found that about one third implemented some form of telemedicine.
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Read the full story here.
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SPONSORED
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TIME100 Most Influential Companies is expanding
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TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2027 entries are now open.
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With new Exceptional Workplaces categories, the TIME100 Companies publication is expanding to recognize businesses pioneering new approaches to how people work, from flexible and hybrid work to technology integration and career development.
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