Implementation of iPads to Increase Compliance with Delivery of New Parent Education in the Newborn Nursery: A Retrospective Study (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) is a serious health problem affecting more than 3,000 infants annually in the US. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC recommend that healthcare providers counsel new parents about the dangers of AHT. Previous studies showed that parental education is effective at reducing incidents of AHT. South Carolina law requires hospitals to provide all new parents with a state-produced educational video about AHT. This mandate was met in different ways in the several hospital campuses within a large SC healthcare system, with some using DVD players, others using workstations on wheels, and others allowing parents to view the video on their own personal devices. Frequent technical barriers and workflow inefficiencies resulted in low rates of compliance with this mandate at several campuses. To improve compliance with the state mandate, the healthcare system standardized video viewing protocol across all campuses by implementing the use of iPads for parental education. Existing literature suggests that patient education can be improved in the hospital setting by utilizing tablet computers, but our literature search failed to find an evaluation of tablet computers for the education of parents in the newborn nursery. We used the implementation of an iPad-based parental education delivery protocol to evaluate whether tablet computers can improve compliance with delivering new parent education in the hospital setting. OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether the introduction of iPads in the newborn nursery resulted in improved rates of parents being offered the opportunity to view a state-mandated video about AHT. METHODS We interviewed physicians and nurses from the newborn nurseries to determine what previous protocols were in place to educate new parents before a standardized iPad-based protocol was implemented across six campuses of a large SC healthcare system. A retrospective study was conducted by reviewing EHR of 1,491 patients across the six campuses to determine the pre- and post-intervention compliance rates of offering the AHT educational video to parents in the newborn nurseries. RESULTS Compliance increased overall (p<.001) across sites from an average of 41.93% (standard deviation of 46.24) to 99.73% (standard deviation of 0.26). Four out of six locations saw a significant increase in compliance rates after introducing the iPad intervention (p <.001). The remaining two locations that showed no difference both had very high rates of pre-intervention compliance. CONCLUSIONS Following the implementation of a standardized iPad-based protocol to deliver new parent education, there was significant improvement in the percentage of new parents who were offered the opportunity to view an educational video about AHT in the newborn nursery. Based on these results, other healthcare providers should consider iPads to be a feasible and effective method for delivering hospital-based education to families in the newborn nursery.