Facebook-like Approach for Sick Babies Wins IT Challenge

A human infant sleeps in his incubator at a neonatal intensive care unit. [Photo by Chris Horry/Wikipedia]

The winning entry in the “Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge” employs a social network approach similar to Facebook to help improve parents’ engagement in the care of sick babies.

The entry, dubbed “NeoStream,” was created by students in the Biomedical Informatics Department at the Stanford University School of Medicine to streamline communication between parents of critically ill children and the caregivers in neonatal intensive care units.

The Challenge is based on “radically improving healthcare through new processes that are enabled by innovative information technology applications and supported by a sustainable market strategy.”

The solutions were creative and most importantly, they were derived from multi-disciplinary viewpoints ranging from business and engineering to public health and medicine.”

— Kenyon Crowley, Director of Health Innovation at the UMD Center of Excellence in Health IT Research, and the competition’s director

The competition, which culminated in April, drew solutions from schools and programs across the country and overseas.

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Learn more at http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/news/stories/2012/Innovate4Healthcare.aspx

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