Personalized Case Driven Parental Education Informatics in the NICU

Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) are foreign and intimidating to parents of premature infants. The high levels of anxiety and stress they can produce needs to be reduced by thoughtful advice from healthcare providers (HCPs), to educate parents about their child's condition. Unfortunately time constraints often limit HCPs to only a few minutes with each baby's parents daily - only enough to convey critical information at a high level and with limited depth. Parents searching for more detailed information themselves in the literature over the web have sometimes reported disappointing experiences. We are proposing to improve parental education by patient-centric web methods leveraging the electronic patient record with internet and cell phone technologies. This can be an important informatics resource, complementing and enhancing face-to-face communication through personalization of education and advice to the parents.