PreeMe+You Hands On App

We carefully craft social and mobile technologies to jumpstart and foster communication and interactions that are essential for premature infant health and development – never to replace them.

Welcome Parents

Preeme+You empowers families to take their babies home feeling prepared, cared for, and without delay. We help you tap into how your medical team is caring for your baby.

NICU medicine is complex, with many shifting clinical markers. In addition, around the clock NICU care means there are many medical caretakers on your baby’s team. Our mobile tool is a partner to parents and medical care teams—deconstructing and communicating NICU medical pathways and illness severity. Everyone is now on the same page in real time. We harmonize and simplify communication to the often very complicated question, “How is my baby doing today? PreeMe+You’s Hands On app provides knowledge for each preemie’s unique personal health status and journey.

Continuous orienting of yourself according to your baby’s unique and changing maturation trajectory helps guide expectations and holistically plans for your baby’s NICU journey home.

You learn how your medical team is taking care of your baby and using NICU medicine to help your baby go home faster. PreeMe+You harmonizes communication between parents and rotating NICU teams. This way, everyone is on the same page.

FAQ

WHAT DOES THE PREEME+YOU HANDS-ON APP DO?

Hands On loops parents in on how their NICU medical teams are assessing the changing illness severity of their baby as their organ systems mature. It was created to help parents engage with their medical team and their baby at the bedside.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Hands On provides a series of yes and no questions that are easy to understand and help familiarize parents with clinical markers and common neonatal physiological processes. These questions are based on PreeMe+You’s neonatal algorithm. You choose how you would like to answer these questions—on your own, with members of your medical team, or both.

Once all the questions are answered, a color score that communicates your baby’s illness severity will be designated. Also, helpful NICU medical information, self care activities, and to dos are matched to your baby’s color score. Now you have access to learning how your baby is doing anytime you would like.

WHY IS HANDS ON HELPFUL?

Parents often say they feel lost in the woods or on a rollercoaster they can’t get off. Hands On is a compass and a “rest” button. Parents can now self orient to their baby’s NICU trajectory to home, check in with their own needs, engage at the bedside, or take a breath. Parents are no longer held to NICU schedules, do not have to worry about missing important information, and can easily tap back in.

DOES IT PREDICT OUTCOME?

As much as we wish for one, Hands On is not a crystal ball. In fact, there is NO crystal ball in the NICU journey. Because premature babies’ organ systems are still developing, any predictions of outcome for individual babies are only as accurate as a coin toss (i.e. not very accurate). Hands On is a time sensitive map of your baby’s NICU journey.

GET IN TOUCH!

Email us at info@preemeandyou.com to learn more!

This web application is unique because it offers NICU parents a self-guided tool for locating their baby’s medical pathway and illness severity.

HOW CAN I GET ACCESS TO IT?

Hands On is not yet publicly available. We are piloting Hands On with NICU academic research leaders and continuing to integrate parent user experience feedback. We are working to bring this to all families. Right now, we are putting the finishing touches on our toolkits and platform. If you are interested in partnering with us, we look forward to hearing from you!

A Partner for Medical Teams

Putting yourself in the shoes of your medical team, you are both caring for the preemie and their families. When you update parents on their baby’s medical condition, your are not only communicating the baby’s illness severity, but you are also making sure that parents’ interpretation of what you are communicating is actually what you intend to communicate. At the same time, you also want to make sure that parents are emotionally cared for. All the while, you only have 15 minutes before you have to rush back and take care of another preemie and talk to another worried family.

Hands On helps guide parents and prepares them for a deeper and more nuanced conversation. By either working through yes and no operative clinical questions with families together or having families already on the same page, medical teams can spend time with families at the bedside in the way they need. Time is precious in the NICU, and Hands On empowers medical teams to go deeper in their explanations and care, minimizing “lost in translation.”

PreeMe+You: Social Benefit Mission and Collaborations

Our research program for PreeMe+You collaborates with two academic hospitals:
The University of Chicago and NorthShore Health Systems.

Dr. Bree Andrews is our PI at The University of Chicago Medical Center.

Bree Andrews, MD/MPH is a neonatologist practicing at a large urban university hospital who wants parents and their baby(ies) to have the best experiences in the NICU and beyond. She is leading a research initiative to improve parenting quality of life in the NICU by creating high-quality opportunities for parenting engagement. She also nurtures families once they go home in a regionally recognized follow-up clinic for medically complex patients. Bree joined PMY as the medical expert on NICU practice and care.

Dr. Marin Arnolds is our PI at NorthShore Health Systems.

Marin Arnolds is a Neonatologist and clinical ethicist at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Chicago, IL. Her research focuses on the experience of parenting in the neonatal intensive care unit and also improving communication between physicians and parents before, during and after their infant’s NICU admission. She is also a mother of two children, and is inspired by each baby and family’s strength during their NICU admission. Dr. Arnolds is passionate about improving quality of life for preemies and their families, and draws on her own experience as a mother in the NICU to to her daughter (born 9 weeks early) to support the families under her care.

How did PreeMe+You come about and who has already used it.

The PMY web application has been tested in approximately 100 families between the two hospitals.

Parents were asked to first reflect on the readiness for mobile technology to learn about their health conditions and care. The survey used was the FIFRE, commonly used to ask patients about how they get and use health information.

Second, parents were asked to track their quality of life as related to the health status of their babies using the Peds Quality of Life Impact Survey.

Our results have been presented at many key meetings including:

Pediatric Academic Societies, Toronto Canada 2018
Pediatric Academic Societies, Baltimore, Maryland 2019
Break the Cycle, Atlanta, Georgia, 2018
Midwest SPR, Chicago, Illinois, October 2019
American Academy of Pediatrics, NCE, New Orleans, LA, October 2019
Break the Cycle Atlanta, Georgia, 2019

We have fostered an appreciation and commitment to research through our trainees:

Abigail Whitney, Pritzker Medical School
Sydney Goldberg, Rochester University and Harvard University
Kathryn Thompson, Pritzker Medical School
Lily Considine, Wellesley College
Kendall Elue, Pritzker Medical School
Dr. Kayla Bates, University of Chicago

Key Findings:

• 95% of parents report interest and availability of mobile technology to learn about their child’s health
• Using our web-application supports improvements in parenting quality of life measures in the NICU
• Parents with fewer resources, measured by both geo-coding and self report, have an increased improvement in quality of life using the PMY web app
• Parents of smaller, more fragile prematures actually sustain bigger improvements over time in quality of life compared to their more mature counterparts
• Improvements for parental quality of life is clinically significant for democratizing health to families facing socio-economic barriers to health.