Telemedicine in the neonatal intensive care unit.

A program of telemedicine has been developed in the NICU at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in Boston, Massachusetts. The telemedicine project, "Baby Care Link," allows families to have increased access to their infant, care team, and educational information during hospitalization and following discharge. The goal of this multidisciplinary project is to provide an approach to managing the care of the very low birth weight (VLBW) infant. Workstations in the families' homes provide education, care schedules, remote sensor links to clinical providers, and videoconferencing. The linkage of home, clinician, and community centers will allow for the episodic needs of high-risk infants while continuously monitoring progress and managing treatments systematically in the home rather than the NICU setting. It is believed that the use of this emerging technology might lead to shorter hospital stays as well as increased parental understanding and comfort, overall parental satisfaction with care, improvement in health status, improvement in clinician satisfaction, and lastly, a reduction in hospital associated costs.