In my last blog, I wrote about how parents’ engagement in home monitoring has been vital to the success of our Cardiac High Acuity Monitoring Program (CHAMP) for babies with single ventricle heart disease. I also discussed how treating parents as partners is our guiding principle for engaging them in using our CHAMP app during the high-risk period between their newborn’s first and second surgeries.

As promised, here are my top tips for how to foster partnerships with those you seek to engage in home monitoring based on what we’ve learned in our CHAMP program.

Foster two-way communication

We don’t just “tell” parents to use the CHAMP tools and send them on their way. We approach home-monitoring education as a two-way process. So we not only explain how to use the tools, we ask parents questions to understand what their life picture looks like. That way, we can tailor how we work with them depending on their specific needs.

For example, we see some families more in clinic because they can’t be as thorough with home monitoring due to their circumstances. Whereas, other parents want us to save them a trip to the emergency room by looking at a video of their baby at three a.m.

Whatever their needs, we make sure the families know they can always ask us for help.

Allow for some give and take

We never want parents to feel bad if they’re not keeping up with every single step of their home monitoring. We know they’re all doing the best they can and want the best for their child. They’re not always going to be 100 percent adherent and that’s okay.

If it feels like submitting three pieces of information each day is getting to be too much for them, I’ll narrow it down and ask them to send just one thing when they’re having a particularly tough day. And I help them understand that by doing so, I can take some pressure off their shoulders by helping to look after their baby using the information or video they share.

Provide positive reinforcement

If an alert is generated by our home-monitoring app, we contact families right away 24 hours/seven days a week. But even if there are no areas of concern, we send a weekly email to parents to provide them with an update. That way, they know we’re looking at the information they’re submitting—and it’s not just going into a vacuum. It reinforces that we’re a team working together to watch over their baby through this critical time.

Practice using the tools yourself

Prior to providing the CHAMP app to our patients’ parents, our team took it home along with a fake baby for a weekend and went through all the steps we’re asking parents to do. So when parents ask us which button to push to submit a video or question, we know because we’ve done it ourselves.

I hope the above tips help you to engage people—whether patients or patients’ families or both—to use the home monitoring tools you offer so that you can partner with them to improve their health and quality of life.

And please let the nurses’ blog team know if you have any questions or comments—or if you have your own patient or family engagement success story. You can reach them via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The post Four tips for engaging patients and families in home monitoring appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Since we started using our home-monitoring app in March of 2014, none of the babies with single ventricle (SV) heart disease in our Cardiac High Acuity Monitoring Program (CHAMP) has died at home – during what is normally a high-risk period. During the interstage, typically the first four to six months of the baby’s life, as many as 20 percent of SV infants don’t survive.

The positive outcomes of CHAMP in recent years wouldn’t have been possible without the engagement of the babies’ parents.

After an SV infant’s first surgery, we ask parents to enter data such as heart rate and oxygen saturation readings into our award-winning CHAMP app on a Microsoft Surface. That data is instantly analyzed in a secure Azure cloud and we’re alerted if any of their baby’s numbers are outside the ranges we’ve set.

We also ask parents to send us a 15-second video of their baby each day. From the video, we can see what the infant’s coloring looks like, if he or she is happy or not feeling well, and count his or her breathing rates.
The technology we’re using now not only captures more information more often, it’s also easier to use than our old system when parents had to document their baby’s data in a three-ring binder and call us weekly with a summary. But it’s still a daily commitment that we’re asking of parents who are going through the emotional strain and stress of having a highly fragile newborn — along with all of their other daily demands.

So we’ve put a lot of thought into how best to keep these parents engaged.

The CHAMP team is not a club any parent ever wants to be part of. We acknowledge this from the beginning and work to understand how we can create the best possible experience with home monitoring as they go through this very difficult time in their and their babies’ lives.

One of our core guiding principles is to treat parents as partners. As nurses, we know that successful home monitoring starts with how we educate people before we send them home with the tools we want them to use — but it doesn’t end there. We’ve learned that developing ongoing, give-and-take relationships with families is crucial.

In my next blog, I’ll share my top tips for how to foster partnerships with those you seek to engage in home monitoring based on what we’ve learned in our CHAMP program. Stay tuned for that soon.

In the meantime, please let the nurses’ blog team know if you have any questions or comments — or if you have your own patient or family engagement success story. You can reach them via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Read more in this series from Lori…

The post To improve home monitoring engagement, treat people as partners appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.