I’ll give you a patient example: Within our neonatal intensive care units, there are some babies who may have a medical or surgical complication that requires advanced support. Once they’re stable enough to get over that immediate, acute problem in our NICU, they have to learn to feed and grow. If they can’t eat, they are often burdened with a hospital stay to learn to do so. In this case, we provide families the education they need to use a scale and a feeding pump, and we can provide the tools they need to feed the baby at home.
We’ve seen some impressive outcomes already. We’re lowering the length of stay for this patient population, and we’re keeping them home and safe. They’re not having to come back to the hospital unnecessarily because of a technology problem or a feeding tube problem. We can provide proactive support, and families don’t need to travel back and forth for care.
HEALTHTECH: What has the feedback been for this program from patients and their families? How are providers responding to this workflow?
The families are loving this, and we’ve seen very high family satisfaction scores since we launched in 2025. They’re saying, “Without this program, we would have otherwise had to go to A, B and C for additional support,” and that A, B and C might mean reaching out to various stakeholders to help provide clinical support or coming to the emergency department for support that we could have otherwise given using technology or virtual support.
We’ve also found that our providers’ workload is somewhat decreasing, because we can customize the number of virtual nursing and provider visits to meet the clinical needs of the patient. This proactive approach in daily or weekly connections with our nurses is avoiding the sudden escalation of needs that patients have in a home setting. So, our providers are knocking down the door to enroll their patients in this program, because we’re seeing not only the benefits for our patients and families but also for our specialty service lines as well.
HEALTHTECH: What’s next for the program?
We’ve extended our reach in Florida. We have patients as far north as Pensacola and as far south as Miami. That’s what’s special about this customizable virtual approach: We can reach families in the most rural settings, as long as they have access to internet support, but we can even provide support with those systems as well.
We’ll continue to expand in Florida, and then, because our organization provides care in multiple states, we have another stand-alone pediatric hospital in Wilmington, Del., and we want to expand our service in the Delaware Valley. That includes reaching patients who may be in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Maryland.
In 2026, as we expand our care model, we want to make sure geography is not a challenge because we have a strong virtual infrastructure.
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