The Power of Participation
Phil Martie / CEO, Nicolette
In my early adult life, I was hyper-confident. I thought I could solve any problem and overcome every obstacle. This was mostly because of my career trajectory. I was in a sleepy industry ripe for disruption and surrounded by management teams working hard to preserve the status quo. Every promotion I received came with expanded control over things I could radically change. For a while, I was fought by peers and management alike, creating a political environment that would surely see me fired if my initiatives failed. But I did it anyway, and after a string of successes, my approach across the industry was embraced and my career took off.
Embarrassingly basic. I took on big professional goals, then fought and won enough battles that I became convinced I was invincible.
I really did believe that.
But then I had premature twins. Extremely premature twins. At 25-weeks gestation, they weighed a mere one pound each and measured 11 inches. They had sick lungs, sepsis, PDA, and lots of other diagnoses. The sight of them was shocking and emotionally debilitating. Their thin, translucent skin left me speechless. The array of leads, IVs, and breathing tubes attached to them broke my heart.
For the first time in my life, I felt helpless. Not only could I not solve any of their problems, I couldn’t even participate in solving them.
The medical device technology and surgical capabilities in a NICU are mindblowing to a newcomer. The fact that babies born so small and acutely impaired have a chance to survive and thrive is incredible. At the same time, there is an absence of tools to help parents navigate the NICU journey. Making collaborative decisions and providing hands-on care often seems completely out of reach, even for parents who are right there in the baby’s room for hours each day. Physically close to their baby, yet distant from care.
Perhaps the most detrimental consequence of this is the absence of parental input. Parents possess the superpower of focus. Because they are focused on only their own babies, they observe things the clinical team does not. The problem is they are often unable to articulate what they see in a manner that the clinical team can use.
So close, yet so distant.
This is the most addressable opportunity for NICUs: parent participation. The key ingredients are already there – appetite, aptitude, and focus. But parents need the right tools for these ingredients to translate to participation in care for their baby as a competent member of the NICU team.
When parents are able to participate in care, their baby’s health outcomes improve. By serving as a competent NICU teammember, they also reduce the cost of care and dramatically improve clinical productivity. But it doesn’t happen very often because the right tools aren’t available.
It is this paradigm that led my co-founders and I to launch Nicolette and our first product, NicoBoard. Our north star metric is participation in care, and this will be the case for everything we build for the NICU and beyond. It is with great enthusiasm that we launch our new NicoBoard campaign, focused on rapidly transforming parents from helpless bystanders to competent members of the NICU team on day one.
If this matches the values of your NICU, request a demo here and learn more.