Burwood Services

Connected Care Design

Clinical Communications

End User Training

As Connecticut’s largest healthcare system, Yale New Haven Health (YNHH) wanted to transform its traditional neonatal intensive care unit (NNICU) into a spacious, state-of-the-art, connected care environment. YNHH leaders asked Burwood’s healthcare advisory and training experts to design and implement a clinical care communications system that would enable the NNICU to create peaceful private and couplet rooms, supporting YNHH’s “patients first” philosophy.

The Challenge: Empower Caregivers with Comprehensive Clinical Communications

Like most NICUs, Yale New Haven Health’s NNICU operated in close quarters to keep caregivers’ eyes and ears on patients at all times. While good for patient safety, this model resulted in noisy, multi-patient bays and crowded rooms. YNNH leaders wanted to enlarge the NNICU with private, quiet patient rooms to improve the patient and family experience. Connected care technology could provide a powerful new means of revolutionizing the age-old model, while enhancing care.

However, care teams were concerned that spreading out patients across two floors and additional rooms would make it harder for them to provide vigilant care. Change management and training-for-adoption would be critical to ensure that caregivers would embrace the new technology, rather than view it as an impediment to patient care.

Burwood Group needed to design and implement a comprehensive clinical care and alert/notification system, while securing the buy-in of the caregiving team. Adding to the challenge was the timeline—Burwood’s connected care and project management team would need to execute the project with just seven months to go-live, without disrupting critical care.

The Solution: Implement Clinical Communication Technology to Provide Digital “Eyes and Ears”

Collaborating with an interdisciplinary project team, Burwood helped YNHH leaders reimagine care delivery, starting with the new vision for patient/family-centric care. Using these deep insights and continual stakeholder engagement, Burwood consultants recommended and implemented a connected care strategy. The scope included redesigning more than 100 clinical workflows, upgrading technology, and building caregiver trust in the new processes. 

The cutting-edge system relies on clinical middleware to instantly transmit data and alarms from each baby’s patient monitor to caregiver smartphones, with a communication application to support alarms, text messaging, and voice calls. For example, nurses can check ventilator data on their smartphone, while monitoring calls from isolettes and receiving alerts with minimal disruption to patients and their families.

Within the aggressive timeline, Burwood not only completed the technical implementation, but also provided user acceptance testing, training-for-adoption, commissioning testing, and active go-live support.

The Outcome: A Confident, Connected Care Team and Improved Patient Experience

Thanks to the interdisciplinary team approach, the new NNICU was launched smoothly and is now quadrupled in size to cover two entire floors of the hospital. Using their new tools, caregivers can connect in real time to patients and families, as well as colleagues, and keep a close watch on patients across the floors. Patients, families, and caregivers alike enjoy fewer alarms and significantly reduced noise in patient care areas, along with greater privacy and comfort.

Burwood Group and Yale New Haven Health delivered a joint presentation on this project at the 2018 AAMI Conference.