Children’s of Alabama has partnered with Locus Health to provide a special iPad app that connects parents with nurse practitioners who treat infants who have undergone complex surgery.
Babies born with a single ventricle must undergo three major open-heart surgeries by the time they are toddlers. The first and most complex surgery occurs at 1 to 2 weeks; the second between 4 and 12 months. The months spent at home between the two can be overwhelming for parents.
Now families served at Children’s of Alabama have a new tool to help them cope – an iPad containing a special app from Locus Health, a Charlottesville, Virginia-based company that develops software to ease the discharge process and transition from hospital to home. The app forms the core of a remote monitoring system that connects parents with the nurse practitioners at Children’s of Alabama who care for their infants.
“These parents have been through a tremendous amount of stress,” said Katelyn Staley, discharge coordinator for Cardiovascular Services at Children’s of Alabama. “Not only do they have a newborn, but the baby requires major open-heart surgery in that first week or two of life. Then they are discharged home; it’s an overwhelming process,” she said.
“The Locus platform was designed specifically for the pediatric patient population with congenital heart disease,” said Sarah Blair, RN, MSN, CRNP, of Children’s of Alabama’s Hearts at Home Program. More than a dozen of the country’s leading children’s hospitals now use the system, which studies find can reduce post-discharge emergency room visits as much as 40 percent and the total hospital days by up to two weeks.
Children’s of Alabama had been using another electronic program, but it was cumbersome, not user-friendly and difficult to extract data from. Before that, all data was collected the old-fashioned way – with paper and pencil.
With the Locus app, parents enter their child’s daily weight, oxygen saturation, heart rate, number of diapers, Synagis dosing and nutritional intake, noting if there is any vomiting or diarrhea. They can also upload photos and videos.
Timely information is critical. For instance, weight gain is vitally important because if the baby stops gaining or loses weight the team needs to intervene quickly before complications occur. In addition, values can be individualized for each infant depending on their medical status. “If a parent enters an out-of-range value it creates a red flag and prompts the caregiver to call the hospital immediately,” Staley said.
The data automatically populates the congenital heart clinical dashboard, which nurse practitioners and clinical nutritionists monitor. Parents can also see current and past data and even track trends across time, Blair said. Data can also be downloaded into a PDF and emailed to physicians.
The remote monitoring is also beneficial since many patients live hours from the hospital and may be followed by a local cardiologist. “Now we can share the information with the cardiologist where they live,” she said.
“It definitely keeps us in constant communication with the families,” Blair said. “We still call and talk to them, but it relieves some of that pressure.”
“Sending families home with the reassurance that nurse practitioners are logging into the system on a daily basis and that they have 24/7 access to a provider is very reassuring,” Staley said.
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