Officials for Vivify Health, a Plano, Texas-based provider of remote-care technology, claim the company’s platform can be customized to deliver care for more than 100 specific conditions and some 500 hospitals and health plans have contracted with it to do so.
Recently added to this list was Children’s Hospital of Alabama which is using Vivify technology to provide remote home care and monitoring for babies who are born with hearts with only one ventricle.
Children with this condition require three major open-heart surgeries in their first two to three years of life. The first, and most complex, usually takes place when they are less than two weeks old. The second takes place when they are four to 12 months old.
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Using the Vivify technology, Children’s of Alabama’s “Hearts at Home” program monitors babies after their first surgery watching for any red flags that signal a decline in their condition while also providing parents with piece of mind. Along with tracking a baby’s weight, pulse, blood sugar and oxygen levels, parents can arrange virtual visits where the hospital’s care team can see how the patient is looking.
The virtual visits can also become virtual meetings of the baby’s interdisciplinary care team with the monitoring nurse or nurse practitioner looping in the patient’s cardiologist, dietician and other care providers.
The technology “gives the care team the ability to lay eyes on the baby,” said Kristy Carlton, RN, a Vivify clinical consultant. “It gives parents a sense of comfort to hear someone say ‘This is normal.’”
Or, if not normal, the care team can tell them when it’s necessary to bring the baby in immediately, Carlton added.
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The platform includes a tool that analyzes the baby’s vital signs and produces a daily health score that can both ease parents’ worries or alert them when closer monitoring might be necessary, said Robin Hill, Vivify vice president of clinical solutions.
Carlton said that Children’s of Alabama, which has 332 beds and 48 neonatal intensive-care bassinets, usually has about 40 babies under its care with this condition. She believes the remote monitoring will result in fewer admissions.
“You see a lot of unnecessary hospital visits because the parents get nervous,”Carlton said. “It is very scary for them to go home.”
Parents receive a digital kit which includes a tablet and unlimited data plan which gives them access to videos and other educational materials on medication and nutritional needs.
Photo: Flickr user robscomputer
