Kansas City,
12
December
2016
|
15:45 PM
America/Chicago

Microsoft blog: To best monitor kids' health at home, parents become partners

Lori Erickson, APRN, partnered with Microsoft on a blog series focused on how to build relationships to improve home monitoring

In recent posts on Microsoft's blog, Lori Erickson, Heart Center APRN, discussed how to improve the success of home monitoring by engaging with parents and developing a partnership in caring for the patient. Based on the great tips she shared it’s easy to see why our CHAMP families love working with Lori!

Part 1: To improve home monitoring engagement, treat people as partners

Taking a newborn home is an exciting and often scary time for parents. Add in that your baby has a heart condition and has needed surgery before they were even a month old, and the stress can be incredible as you leave the hospital setting and go home. Single ventricle nurses can help parents while they are at home in the first few months of life by proactively monitoring the infants.

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. READ MORE HERE....

 

Part 2: Four tips for engaging patients and families in home monitoring

As nurses, we’d always rather be proactive than reactive. We don’t just want to wait for a phone call that something bad has happened to our patient. But in order to be proactive, we often need the help of our patients and their families, especially when home monitoring is part of the care plan.

In the first of two blog posts, 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. READ MORE HERE....

Learn more about CHAMP: http://www.childrensmercy.org/champ/