Dr. Girish Shirali, a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Mercy hospital in Kansas City has created an app that has already saved babies and made life easier for their worried parents, and now it’s expanding across the country and being contemplated for many types of diseases as well. Shirali’s app is called Cardiac High Acuity Monitoring Program, or CHAMP, consists of a Microsoft Surface 3 running Windows 10, connected to a database in the Microsoft Cloud. This app has been a success with 62 patients in Kansas City so far, and now 16 families in Seattle are using it.
Before the app and tablet were introduced, parents would check various vital signs at home, such as heartrate, weight and oxygen saturation, that are important indicators of cardiac health, and then it was up to them to provide that information to the hospital each week over the phone. Otherwise nurses would try to track down the parents to find out if they were conceed about anything.
With this app, the family enters the baby’s information in the app throughout each day, and the figures are instantly analyzed in the cloud. If there are any measurements outside healthy cardiac parameters, such as oxygen saturation that’s too low or high, the baby’s medical team is automatically alerted. There’s also an “I’m conceed” box parents can click that will immediately page the nurse.
“It was a reactive model,” says Lori Erickson, a nurse practitioner and the clinical coordinator for the CHAMP program. “Now it’s become proactive. I can see every piece of data within two minutes as it goes from the tablet to the cloud, and even if there are no alerts, we look through the reports every day. We can catch things before parents do, because we’re the ones who are medically trained, and that’s the way it should be, to reduce the burden on the parents.”
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