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The German health care system faces the great challenge of ensuring high-quality and comprehensive health care in the future as the shortage of physicians continues to grow. Telemedicine-supported healthcare networks, which guarantee access to specialized medical expertise close to the patient’s home and tailored to their needs, and thus to high-quality patient-centered treatment, could provide a solution. The TELnet@NRW best-practice project provides a blueprint for expert teleconsultations and put them into practice. TELnet@NRW demonstrated that expert teleconsultations improve interdisciplinary exchange and thus increase quality and efficiency in healthcare. With the widespread telemedical network as a new structure of the healthcare system, TELnet@NRW enabled a more efficient use of existing resources. TELnet@NRW was funded in the first phase of the Innovation Fund. The experts from the two university hospitals in Aachen and Münster provided daily expert teleconsultations to the 17 cooperating hospitals and two physician networks. A 24/7/365 availability was provided, accompanied by training for doctors and nursing staff aimed at improving evidence-based care. Communication took place via an encrypted audio-video conferencing system and the certified data exchange platform FallAkte Plus. The aim of TELnet@NRW was to establish a cross-sectoral telemedical network as a new digital form of care. A total of > 150 000 patients were included. With TELnet@NRW, a major step towards future-proof healthcare was taken, and for us this means providing patients with high-quality care close to patients’ homes. This is currently being used as the conceptual basis for the Virtuelles Krankenhaus NRW as a possible solution for the continuation of former project services.There is a high demand for critical care, which is forecasted to further grow in the future. Increasing patient morbidity and complexity concurring with a shortage of trained intensivists imposes challenges on critical care clinicians. Weathering these challenges, telemedical programs can help utilize and allocate resources more efficiently as well as foster adherence to best practice, thereby directly impacting quality of care. Studies have predominantly shown reductions in mortality and length of stay. Vorinostat purchase Successful telemedical programs employ experienced intensivists, have well-functioning equipment and high acceptance among on-site clinicians. The multicenter, pragmatic, stepped wedge cluster-randomized controlled quality improvement trial Enhanced Recovery after Intensive Care (ERIC) pilots a new form of critical care provision in Germany. With a target study sample size of n = 1431 patients, the study aims to utilize telemedicine to increase adherence to a set of evidence- and consensus-based quality indicators for acute critical care. In an intersectoral case-care management, patients are followed three and six months after discharge from the intensive care unit to be assessed for long-term impairments and post-intensive care syndrome.Communication and teamwork skills are, besides clinical knowledge, key components of high quality care in modern intensive care units. In light of high staff fluctuations among intensive care unit teams and disparities in clinical experience, an ongoing training is essential to ensure optimal performance in stressfull situations. Further, when implementing new procedures, an adequate concept for staff education is of utmost importance. Blended learning is a novel approach, combining autonomous web-based education and on-site workshops in order to improve the training process. Enhanced Recovery after Intensive Care (ERIC) is a newly developed telemedical intervention targeted at improving evidence-based practice in critical care, guided by quality indicators defined by the German Interdisciplinary Society of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine (DIVI). This telemedical intervention is supplemented with a blended-learning concept combining an e-learning website, simulator-based workshops and on-site training in order to expand the knowledge and practical skills regarding adherence to the quality indicators.Goal-oriented quality management in health care is an essential tool to provide good medical practice and treatment. It aims at a patient-centred case management with high transparency of structural and clinical process aspects, as well as patient outcome. An objective and comprehensive description of clinical care includes the use of quality indicators. However, the appliance of those indicators falls short, when the evaluation of quality is not followed by recommendations for improvement.As a highly specified area in health care provided in hospitals, intensive care medicine is characterized by complex interprofessional and multidisciplinary approaches. In addition, critical care units are an expensive resource. In order to provide an economic and yet high quality patient care, treatments should be evidence-based, and cost-drivers must be analysed for their effectiveness on patient-outcome.Various methods of quality assurance allow for a formative evaluation of intensive care units by peer reviews, including the use of quality indicators. This article focuses on peer review systems currently applied in German hospitals, and particularly describes quality indicators that have been established by DIVI (German Interdisciplinary Society of Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine). It also addresses the need for a professional dialogue between equal partners. This has to accompany each peer review that aims at an improvement in quality of critical patient care.Lung ultrasound is a well-studied diagnostic procedure in emergency medicine. Over the last several years, international research groups have investigated the role of lung ultrasound to evaluate neonatal respiratory diseases. Specific diagnostic algorithms and key features of a neonatal pneumothorax have been released. Compared to X-ray examination, lung ultrasound has many advantages, such as faster diagnostic time, lack of exposure to ionizing radiation, and excellent sensitivity and specificity. Thus, lung ultrasound contributes to the improvement of medical healthcare in the neonatal intensive care unit. We consider the use of lung ultrasound as a new standard procedure to diagnose a pneumothorax in neonatology.