nbc news correspondent ellison barber. ellison, show us how it works. reporter: katy, yes, this is the operations centers for the virtual icu. here you have nurses, registered nurses, actively monitoring patients in the icu from behind their computer screens. virtual doctors can even do this from other states. let s pretend for a minute that i am smaert than i actually am, and say i am an icu doctor or internist or one of those registered nurses working on the virtual side of things. say i m watching all of this and i notice something is going wrong with a covid patient. i can click into their room here, notify the team that works on that floor, bedside team, and communicate with them. so say you have someone outside of this room trying to get inside but it takes a little bit of time, right, to put on all the ppe necessary to go into a covid patient s room. watch what i can do from here. say i want to check their oxygen