The short answer is “a lot.”
Saint Clare’s Hospital paid about $50,000 in start-up costs to install the electronic monitoring systems in its 12-bed ICU, and it pays about the same amount per year per bed for the e-ICU service. The St. Louis company bills the hospital, not the patients.
Sutter Health made an initial $50,000 investment on the combination of the e-ICU program and bar-coding, and pays for one physician (18-19 hours a day) and three or four critical care nurses (24 hours a day) in each of its two intensivist hubs. The cost is built into the room charge and costed out between the Sutter Health system and the individual hospitals.