Family members and friends of adult patients at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics are now able to share health updates, photographs, and supportive messages through a web-based service. Mindy Egeland, director of the Patients' Library and advocate of this new adult service, talks about the service and how it works:
What is this Web-based service called?
This is called CarePages.
Are CarePages new to UI Hospitals and Clinics?
No, they are not. We've had them for about three years with our pediatric patients and their families.
What is the purpose of starting a CarePages program for adults?
We've really had great success with our pediatric families, in fact in three years we've had over a million hits.
Tell us how Web CarePages works. How does a patient or family member go about setting up CarePages?
It's really quite simple, we've made it as easy as we can here at the hospital; we've put workstations in all of the family lounges on the inpatient units and in those lounges we provided information so the families can see quite easily how to get to the link. It's on our home page for uihealthcare.com and they just click and it takes them right into a portal which shows them how to set up a page or get a user name so they can access a page.
How do people find out their friend or relative has a CarePages site set up to visit online?
Once the patient family gets into the portal, they actually can invite people from their address book that they use for their e-mail, so it quite easily allows them to select all of the people in their life that they want to hear about their situation at the hospital, and then those people get an automatic note that allows them to click in and sign in.
Can people viewing CarePages also communicate or make comments back to the patient, via the Web site?
They sure can, there's actually kind of a little log book that allows them to make comments or share positive thoughts, quite often they say, "Glad to hear things are going well," or "Sorry to hear things aren't going so well, and give us a call if you need anything," so it allows the family to hear from their whole support network just by looking at one simple Web site.
Will patients be allowed to keep their CarePages updated, even after they are discharged from UI Hospitals and Clinics?
They sure can, in fact many patients use this sort of as a continuing log for their chronic condition or if they have an ongoing situation where they need to keep returning to the hospital, and then as long as they keep using it, they'll keep it active with CarePages; and at some point they can actually have it archived for a while just to make sure that they don't need it again soon. Some families do find that they need to come back and use it again, so as long as it's within about a year, they actually can recall the page up and start using it again.
How successful has the University of Iowa Children's Hospital CarePages been?
It's incredible. We get comments from families all the time now just saying how beneficial this has been, it's just kind of allowed them to keep all the family in touch with what's going on with the patient; and it gives them that much more support without a lot of bothersome phone calls at the patient bedside when the patient is trying to sleep. As I said, we had over a million hits in the three years and that's with just a few pediatric patients, we have only about 170 pediatric beds here at the hospital.
When will the adult CarePages program begin for family/patient use?
We go online live with that on Monday, May 14. |
