Study suggests parents' virtual visits aid coping with preemies

Monday, December 4th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

CHICAGO (AP) _ Stephanie and Mark Bishop can visit their tiny premature daughter in the hospital, talk to her nurses and become fluent in the scary-sounding medical jargon that fills the neonatal intensive care unit _ all without leaving home.

The Internet-based program that provides these ``virtual visits'' results in greater family satisfaction than traditional care, and may result in babies being sent home sooner, a study at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center suggests.

In the study of 56 babies, all received the same type of medical care. But those whose parents used the telemedicine program went home two days earlier on average, mostly because their parents felt better informed about how to care for them, the researchers said.

An infant intensive care unit ``is a very foreign place to most lay people, a very high-tech world filled with its own illnesses and lots of clinical jargon,'' said lead author Dr. James Gray, Beth Israel's director of newborn services. ``It's very intimidating to families.''

The educational program, he said, helped remove some of that fear.

The six-month study of the Baby CareLink system involved infants who were born weighing less than 3 1/2 pounds and were hospitalized for up to three months. It was published in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Families of 26 infants received $1,500 home computers with desktop video-conferencing equipment. A special Web site was created for them featuring daily photographs of their children and updates on the babies' health; information about medical conditions common in prematurity and explanations of medical equipment and lingo; and access to other parents of premature babies in a sort of support-group exchange of information.

The video-conferencing system allowed them to hook up to the intensive-care unit for visits with their babies and discussions with their caregivers.

Baby CareLink infants were sent home about two days earlier on average from the $2,000-plus-a-day intensive care unit, and none had to be transferred first to general-care community hospitals. Six of the 30 control-group babies were transferred before being sent home.

Parents of Baby CareLink infants reported significantly fewer problems with quality of care _ 3 percent versus 13 percent. They also gave higher ratings than control-group families for care and information received.

For the Bishops, whose daughter, Rachel, is hospitalized at Beth Israel but was not a study participant, the program has been a godsend.

Stephanie Bishop, 28, gave birth in October, three months early, after developing pre-eclampsia, a serious condition involving dangerously high blood pressure and fluid retention. Rachel weighed less than 1 1/2 pounds and was whisked into a world of ventilators, incubators and intravenous tubes.

``I didn't know a baby that small could survive,'' Mrs. Bishop said. ``I didn't even know that NICU existed,'' she said, using medical lingo for the neonatal intensive care unit.

``It was very overwhelming at first. Now I feel like I could work there,'' she said.

The Bishops live in Randolph, about 40 minutes from Boston, and initially visited their daughter every day. Both recently returned to work but can still feel close to their daughter even when they cannot be there.

Though not the focus of this study, the video component is also being used by other Beth Israel families for virtual doctor visits once their babies have been sent home.

Post-discharge visits are not meant to replace office visits, but ``can provide one more safety net'' for at-risk babies, Gray said.

Gray and Dr. Charles Safran of Beth Israel helped develop Baby CareLink, and Safran created the company Clinician Support Technology to market the system.

Eight other hospitals are using the system at a cost of about $12,000 a year, said Dr. Howard Goldberg, director of clinical research and development at Clinician Support Technology.

So far, Beth Israel is the only one using the costly video-conferencing component, paid for by funding from the National Library of Medicine's telemedicine initiative, which also funded the study.