A technology-based patient and family engagement consult service for the pediatric hospital setting.

Objective: The Vanderbilt Children's Hospital launched an innovative Technology-Based Patient and Family Engagement Consult Service in 2014. This paper describes our initial experience with this service, characterizes health-related needs of families of hospitalized children, and details the technologies recommended to promote engagement and meet needs. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively reviewed consult service documentation for patient characteristics, health-related needs, and consultation team recommendations. Needs were categorized using a consumer health needs taxonomy. Recommendations were classified by technology type. Results: Twenty-two consultations were conducted with families of patients ranging in age from newborn to 15 years, most with new diagnoses or chronic illnesses. The consultation team identified 99 health-related needs (4.5 per consultation) and made 166 recommendations (7.5 per consultation, 1.7 per need). Need categories included 38 informational needs, 26 medical needs, 23 logistical needs, and 12 social needs. The most common recommendations were websites (50, 30%) and mobile applications (30, 18%). The most frequent recommendations by need category were websites for informational needs (39, 50%), mobile applications for medical needs (15, 40%), patient portals for logistical needs (12, 44%), and disease-specific support groups for social needs (19, 56%). Discussion: Families of hospitalized pediatric patients have a variety of health-related needs, many of which could be addressed by technology recommendations from an engagement consult service. Conclusion: This service is the first of its kind, offering a potentially generalizable and scalable approach to assessing health-related needs, meeting them with technologies, and promoting patient and family engagement in the inpatient setting.

Adoption of Secure Messaging in a Patient Portal across Pediatric Specialties.

Few studies have explored adoption of patient portals for pediatric patients outside primary care or disease-specific applications. We examined use of patient-provider messaging in a patient portal across pediatric specialties during the three years after implementation of pediatric portal accounts at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. We determined the number of patient-initiated message threads and clinic visits for pediatric specialties and percentage of these outpatient interactions (i.e., message threads + clinic visits) done through messaging. Generalized estimating equations measured the likelihood of message-based interaction. During the study period, pediatric families initiated 33,503 messages and participated in 318,386 clinic visits. The number of messages sent (and messaging percentage of outpatient interaction) increased each year from 2,860 (2.7%) to 18,772 (17%). Primary care received 4,368 messages (3.4% of outpatient interactions); pediatric subspecialties, 29,135 (13.0%). Rapid growth in messaging volume over time was seen in primary care and most pediatric specialties (OR>1.0; p<0.05).