Boston, MA – More and more we’re seeing hospitals champion innovation within their own walls. Chris recently covered learnings from Cleveland Clinic’s Innovation Summit, and this week it was Boston Children’s Hospital’s turn to take the stage as they hosted their annual Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards.
Boston Children’s Hospital has been on a bit of an innovation hot streak lately, and that trend continued with the announcement of a number of digital health initiatives including partnerships with IBM’s Watson to diagnose and treat rare pediatric diseases, Grand Rounds to streamline second opinions, and Rock Health to speed up development of new technologies.
In addition, they released the results for their in-house developed discharge app, DisCo, which was created to solve a number of inefficiencies that the care team was noticing during the discharge process.
“A staff nurse would sit at a desk and spend a couple hours calling each and every family who was discharged at home,” Dunn said. “As you can imagine we got a lot of voicemail, we got a lot of, ‘Mom’s at work, here’s grandma,’ but she doesn’t know what the answers to the questions are. Maybe when we called they didn’t need us but 10 minutes after we called, someone needed us. This was centered [on] what was working for us, not what the parents needed.”
-Boston Children’s Hospital Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Kelly Dunn
The app simply sends a survey link with follow up questions via SMS and email, and once answered, the data is reviewed on a dashboard by the care team who can then respond to any issues.
The results? 99% of parents found the app useful. DisCo is looking like yet another glowing success story for BCH’s innovation efforts.
