When a child comes into the world, a series of tasks begins for both parents and hospital. It is, inter alia, the hospital's task to ensure that new parents are well informed about such issues as infant care, breastfeeding, and physical and mental recovery after birth.

Today, many new parents are discharged shortly after birth, which means that the hospitalisation time is decreasing and the number of outpatients giving birth is increasing. This fact also means that much of the subsequent contact between parents and hospital shifts to outpatient reapproaches or telephone contacts.

To this end, Patient@home conducts a pilot project, in which existing telemedicine solutions from COPD patients - the so-called COPD Briefcase - are offered to maternity patients in the form of a Baby Briefcase. The solution is an electronic briefcase, by means of which patients can get into video contact with hospital staff directly from their own homes. With such a solution, hospital staff may follow breastfeeding and babies on the screen.

The pilot project includes 32 families, and the Baby Briefcase will be made available to each of them for 3-6 days.

Visions

The purpose of the pilot project is to explore the initial experience of using the Baby Briefcase - including lessons learned from a small group of maternity parents and hospital staff. In addition, intentions are to test a piece of telemedicine technology, which will make new parents feel safe by minimising the number of outpatient visits to the hospital after birth.

Furthermore, the objective of the tested technology is to reduce the number of newborns loosing weight as well as the number of new mothers giving up breastfeeding within the first six weeks after birth.