Children's Health is teaming up with UT Southwestern to provide an innovative Neonatal TeleTransport Program, where critical babies can be cared for remotely.
"This is a program that builds on our capability for telemedicine in neonatology," says Dr. Rashmin Savani, Division Director of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Children's Health and Professor of Pediatrics at UT Southwestern.
Why was it neccesary? The sheer size of Texas, and the distance between Children's, UT Southwestern, and other hospitals that they work with.
Now the program is taking another step, allowing doctors in Dallas to see and hear how babies are doing in high definition while a child is being transported.
"The transport team can't lug around big cameras and whatnot," says Dr. Savani. "You have to have a nimble system, and have to have it not interfere with the transport."
So the IT team at UT Southwestern developed an iPad version of a system to connect Level IV physicians with transport teams who are assessing patients at a remote location. The system can also connect the doctors with the child's family.
"That's a really important part of this," says Dr. Savani. "We start developing a relationship with the family so that...we already know them and they already know us."
And they're already working on the next step: TeleCooling.
"We know that if babies are suffering during labor and delivery, if you cool these babies...you can improve the outcome on 50% of these babies," says Dr. Savani.
The TeleTransport will allow physicians to examine whether or not the child needs the cooling treatment, and utilize devices to actively control temperature on the baby.
"Time is brain. We can now salvage these babies even faster because we have this TeleTransport capability," says Dr. Savani.
