APPLICATIONS FOR THE NATIONAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE

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The contractor will, with the use of telematics, develop a program which will provide educational and emotional support to families of high risk newborns both during their hospitalization and following discharge. The innovative use of this emerging technology will not only lead to shorter hospital stays but will also increase parental understanding and comfort, overall parental satisfaction with their baby's NICU care, improve the child's overall health status, improve clinician satisfaction, and provide-a clear cost savings. The contractor will adapt an adult telemedicine workstation called the Continuously Available Medical Care (CAMC) homestation for use with very low birth weight infants. The CAMC homestation uses multimedia education and monitoring coupled with ISDN enabled teleconferencing to reengineer clinical care for the chronically ill. This project will demonstrate how the national health infrastructure can be used to improve the quality of care for very low birth weight newborns as judged from both family and provider perspectives, and examine in a controlled clinical trial the potential of telematics to decrease the cost of NICU care for very low birth weight infants by increasing the efficiency of care and by reducing overall length of stay.