Our Model & Scope
The M Health Fairview Critical Care Domain operates through a highly collaborative model, enhancing the scope and quality of critical care across the M Health Fairview system. The Domain integrates multi-departmental and interdisciplinary expertise, encompassing all adult intensive care units (ICUs) across the M Health Fairview System.
Critical Care clinicians and leadership represent a collaboration between three University of Minnesota academic departments—Anesthesiology, Medicine, and Surgery—and our community-based partners, including Fairview Health Medical Group. Within this structure, our providers deliver direct patient care 24/7/365 in medical, surgical, cardiovascular, and medical-surgical ICUs. Additional intensive care units, including neuroscience and cardiac care units, function as affiliates, enriching the domain's expertise and clinical approach. This comprehensive framework ensures consistent, streamlined, and specialized critical care delivery throughout the M Health Fairview system where care is enhanced by around-the-clock availability of intensivist expertise, delivered by not only on-site intensivists but also via tele-ICU and hybrid models.
Leveraging the Intensive Care Network's hub-and-spoke model through telemedicine and centralized triage enables hospitals to deliver optimal care levels, facilitating seamless transitions to tertiary and quaternary care when necessary. Dedicated research infrastructure and educational initiatives disseminate standardized, high-quality practices throughout the system, ensuring frontline staff alignment across all sites.
Regular multidisciplinary forums bring together clinicians and leaders from each site to continuously innovate care delivery models, streamline processes, improve clinical outcomes, ensure consistency in care, and reduce unnecessary variation through evidence-based practices. Robust, data-driven performance improvement initiatives inform these efforts, aiming to elevate patient experience and outcomes while reducing total care costs. Additionally, multidisciplinary education and clinically relevant research opportunities are actively promoted throughout the organization.