The contractor will, with the use of telematics, develop a program which will provide educational and emotional support to families of high risk newborns both during their hospitalization and following discharge. The innovative use of this emerging technology will not only lead to shorter hospital stays but will also increase parental understanding and comfort, overall parental satisfaction with their baby's NICU care, improve the child's overall health status, improve clinician satisfaction, and provide-a clear cost savings. The contractor will adapt an adult telemedicine workstation called the Continuously Available Medical Care (CAMC) homestation for use with very low birth weight infants. The CAMC homestation uses multimedia education and monitoring coupled with ISDN enabled teleconferencing to reengineer clinical care for the chronically ill. This project will demonstrate how the national health infrastructure can be used to improve the quality of care for very low birth weight newborns as judged from both family and provider perspectives, and examine in a controlled clinical trial the potential of telematics to decrease the cost of NICU care for very low birth weight infants by increasing the efficiency of care and by reducing overall length of stay.
| Gray, J E; Safran, C; Davis, R B et al. (2000) Baby CareLink: using the internet and telemedicine to improve care for high-risk infants. Pediatrics 106:1318-24 |
| Safran, C; Goldberg, H (2000) Electronic patient records and the impact of the Internet. Int J Med Inform 60:77-83 |
| Gray, J; Pompilio-Weitzner, G; Jones, P C et al. (1998) Baby CareLink: development and implementation of a WWW-based system for neonatal home telemedicine. Proc AMIA Symp :351-5 |
| Gray, J; Jones, P C; Phillips, M et al. (1998) Telematics in the neonatal ICU and beyond: improving care, communication and information sharing. Stud Health Technol Inform 52 Pt 1:294-7 |
| Gray, J; Jones, P C; Phillips, M et al. (1997) Telematics in the neonatal ICU and beyond: improving care for high-risk newborns and their families. Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp :413-7 |
