Supporting All Families of Premature Infants at Prentice Women’s Hospital from Admission through Discharge: The SMART NICU2HOME App

Of the 450,000 annual premature births (<37 weeks) nationwide, over 600 occur in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Prentice Women’s Hospital (PWH). With premature infants having the longest average length of stay (LOS) and the highest rates of morbidity and rehospitalization, their parents suffer from emotional stress and lack of confidence in their ability to parent. A growing body of evidence shows that well-designed mobile health applications can lead to better health outcomes and lower costs. There is a pressing need for a mobile strategy to better engage and support parents’ information and communication needs across the NICU stay. Building on our prior success, we propose to develop SMART NICU2HOME, an innovative suite of mHealth applications designed for parents of premature infants to receive real-time information about their infants as well as personalized education material based on the infant’s clinical status and parents’ anticipated concerns during their hospitalization. Then in a field trial with parents of 150 control infants and 150 intervention infants, we aim to prove its ability to 1) improve parents’ competency in caring for their sick infants, 2) reduce stress, and 3) improve satisfaction with the NICU services at PWH.