App Helps Coordinate Care

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

At Miami Children’s Hospital, apps are helping parents take over their child’s care when their hospital stay is over.

Miami Children’s Hospital CIO Edward Martinez says using apps is helping parents care for their children when their hospital stay ends. Because many of these parents are young or raising their first child, often times they are less educated about issues and need a helping hand to coordinate their child’s care.

According to Martinez, parents are more involved and tech savvy than ever before. “They want to have their information, and they want to have it now,” he said in an article for MobiHealth News. “So we feel that the engagement from that perspective — getting them engaged that early on — will get us a much better outcome earlier because they like the idea of being engaged on mobile and not face-to-face. They don’t like the face-to-face. They like texting, and they like to look it up on a handheld.”

The app’s latest feature is a virtual discharge option, so that parents can better remember discharge instructions. “The thing about pediatric care is that mostly moms — dads sometimes, but mostly moms — are highly responsible for the care of the kid when they go home,” Martinez told Healthcare IT News. “You make sure they get the injections, if it’s diabetes. If they’re on a pulmonary machine, they have to make sure the ventilator is working correctly, so they become very, very good at caregiving, and the fact that we’re giving them instructions has made it much better.”

The Hospital’s app also offers:

• appointment reminders
• a hospital location finder
• an indoor location aware system that enables step by step directions for patients and their parents getting around the hospital
• an online store that allows families to deliver cafeteria food or gifts to a patient in the hospital