Empowering parents.
Easing stress.
Admission to the neonatology department is a major event for expectant or brand-new parents. Many parents experience this time as an emotional rollercoaster with feelings of joy, sadness, helplessness and uncertainty. As a caregiver, you try to mentally support and guide the parents as best you can. It is very important that parents are well informed and involved as much as possible in the care of their child. NeoCare helps with this.
NeoCare is a digital platform specially developed for parents with a baby in a NICU, High Care or Medium Care department.
In addition to very extensive expert information from the own ward, NaoCare offers a handy diary function so parents can keep track of their child’s development themselves. Parents also receive messages with photos/videos from the department if they are unable to attend. That’s a comforting thought.
NeoCare fits in with the ideas of Family Integrated Care in which responsibility and involvement of parents, joint decision-making, and attachment with the child are paramount.
When I woke up I saw a new picture of a content, sleeping Jack. My day couldn’t have had a better start!
Mary, mother of Jack (1482 gr)
NeoCare consists of three parts:
Portal for the caregiver
Portal for the caregiver to invite parents, manage information, and possibly view data.
A smartphone app for the parents
To keep your own data, read information, and receive messages with photos/videos from the ward.
An iPad app for the nurses
An app for the ward iPad to take photos/videos of a child, and send them along with messages to concerned parent.
Portal for the hospital
The portal for the healthcare professional is accessible from anywhere and can be used for a variety of purposes, including:
- Managing articles and videos in the Content Management System.
- Creating, one-off care paths with step-by-step relevant information for the parents.
- Inviting parents into a specific care path and possibly monitor data remotely.
A parent’s invitation only requires the child’s name, email address and details. Parents download the app for their phone and receive details via email to activate the account in the app.
App for the parents
Diary
In the NeoCare app parents will find a diary in which they can track weight, nutrition, breast-milk production and mood. They can also note their experiences and add their own photos.
This part of NeoCare can possibly be expanded or adapted as the hospital desires. Please contact us for more information.
Furthermore, at the top of the screen, parents are virtually coached to read messages and articles for that day.
Care paths
The care paths guides parents step-by-step through the admission of their child, even at home. The care path timeline shows parents in chronical order:
- The articles and messages that are relevant to their specific care path.
- All items they themselves inserted into the diary.
- The messages with pictures/videos that were sent by the ward.
This creates a well-organized diary of events that can be exported and kept as a reference book full of memories.
Message from the ward
The nurses app on the ward iPad allows photos/videos and messages to be sent to parents in their absence. The parent receives the message directly in the app.
Insights
The development of weight, nutrition, breast-milk production, mood and any other diary functions are displayed in clear graphs. That way the parents can keep track of the development themselves and are more involved in the care.
Library
In the library the parents will find all educational information from their own hospital. This can be about the equipment, definitions, treatments, syndromes, discharge and transfer, etc. This also includes subjects that do not appear in a specific care path.
As healthcare provider you can refer to the information in the NeoCare app during conversations. In this way parents can read back all of the information in their own time or search for new information themselves.
More
The parents have the possibility in the ‘More’ menu to save all hospital appointments in one overview. The parent can also invite others to view (part of) the app, for example the partner or grandparents. In this way the wider community of the parents is also kept informed.
The nurses app
From the ward iPad, the nurse can very easily send a message with a photo or video to the parent if they are unable to be on the ward. For specific events, ‘stickers’ are available to digitally mark a ‘milestone’ (e.g. 2 kilos). This way the parents do not have to miss important events, or, for example, at the end of the night shift a message with a photo can be sent to let them know that the night went well. This prevents a lot of phone calls in the morning.