In Defense of Telling Patients They're Dying via Robot

At 2 a.m. in February, I found myself speaking with the family of a dying man. We had never met before, and I had only just learned of the patient. As an ICU doctor, I have been in this situation on many occasions, but there was something new this time. The family was 200 miles away, and we were talking through a video camera. I was staffing the electronic intensive care unit, complete with a headset, adjustable two-way video camera, and six screens of streaming data. The eICU at Emory University in Atlanta provides care by physicians trained in critical care medicine to a number of hospital locations within the large Emory system.