Announcing Nicolette’s New Product Campaign: The Power of Participation

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.

Take Charge of Your Health

Don’t be a passive patient.

Truly personalized medicine depends on one agent of change: the patient. Leading your own healthcare journey depends on taking actions. Taking action takes confidence and persistence. Here are some essential steps we recommend to get going and stay the course:

 

The obvious big picture goal is to recover and live your healthiest life possible. But this overarching aim to just “get better” can sometimes be impersonal or out of scope. Add personal meaning to goals by making them more specific to how they will improve your life. From there you can drill down into the numbers that need to change.

Take the example of high blood pressure. Current target guidelines are below 120 over 80. If your blood pressure is moderately above this guideline, say 128 over 85, it’s simple to acknowledge that it’s high and needs to come down over time. However, it likely doesn’t inspire a consistent and rigorous commitment to actions on a daily basis.

By contrast, translating high blood pressure to life is very inspiring, as it leads to issues such as:

  • Increased risk of heart attack, stroke, vision problems, and sexual dysfunction
  • Higher susceptibility to negative health events due to stress or rigorous activity
  • Greater difficulty in returning to normal levels as one ages

With this knowledge, ask yourself: what about lowering your blood pressure means the most to you? As a result, your true goals may look like these:

  • I want to look and feel great at my kids’ weddings
  • I want to run a marathon
  • I want to have a great sex life as I get older
  • I want to take the risk of starting a business and be healthy enough to handle the stress

Getting below 120 / 80 now means a lot more.

 

Now it’s time to get into the concrete details. Work with your healthcare team to come up with the highly-specific actions that will get you to your goal. High specificity makes the actions easy to track and simple to commit to. For high blood pressure, these might be along the lines of:

  • Eliminate soda from your diet
  • Walk or jog 3 miles per day
  • Meditate for 15 minutes each morning
  • Eat something green at both lunch and dinner

These are simple to comply with because they form a checklist that can be tracked each day. Contrast this with the less specific idea of “eating healthier” or “getting exercise”. These are not wrong, but impossible to track and hence know whether what you are doing is working.

 

You can use pencil & paper, a spreadsheet, or even a digital health app (our favorite). No matter how you do it, it’s critical to document two things:

1. Actions taken

2. The metric you are improving

In the case of blood pressure, you would document whether you complied with no soda, greens at lunch & dinner, meditation, and distance of your walk/jog. Since these are daily actions, you would track them every day. At the same time, you would measure your blood pressure frequently and establish a trend.

Tracking actions and metrics empowers you in the following ways:

  • Understanding what works: You need to know if your prescribed actions are working for you. If it’s been one month and the needle isn’t moving on blood pressure, additional actions may need to be taken. On the flipside, if it’s working and you’re feeling good, perhaps you can do more, like run faster and farther.
  • Compliance checking: Keep yourself accountable for sticking with your goals. Without documentation, it is easy to trick yourself into believing that you’ve made changes that you actually haven’t. It’s important to know that if the desired effects are not happening whether it’s because you need to try something else or you haven’t been complying with what you originally set out to do.
  • Motivating yourself: Making positive changes are not naturally easy, at least not in the beginning. The first few days can feel like an eternity, especially if the results aren’t showing up right away. Recording the daily victories when you accomplish your goals makes every win real, and can help motivate you to stay on track.

 

Your healthcare journey is much easier and enjoyable when shared with others. There are many individuals around you that can and want to be a part of it. Take the initiative to reach out to the following networks for support along your journey.

  • Healthcare team: These are your medical experts and know the technicalities of your health goals. You need them to provide their medical experience and knowledge as much as they need you to provide your expertise in yourself and your body.
  • Family and friends: They may know things about you that are not apparent to yourself that can help you on your health journey. Perhaps they’ve noticed changes in behavior or attitude as a result of high blood pressure that you haven’t realized yourself. Reach out to them for a second opinion or as your social support system to guide and empower you.
  • Other patients: No one patient can know all resources and research available to them. Luckily, there is a high chance that there are other patients going through what you are going through. Plenty of online and in-person patient communities, like this, exist where stories and experiences are shared. Utilize this collective knowledge to enable you to make more informed medical decisions.

Introducing the Nicolette Empowerment Blog

Big health is upon us. We’re not referring to an evil oligarchy, rather the enormity of opportunity and options available promoting both community and individual well-being. There is focus and pressure from all sides. Consider these:

  • Access to care is transforming from a consumer service to a human right, with far- reaching implications for providers, payers, and government
  • Technologies are rapidly coming to market that enable amazing recovery from acute health issues and improvement in quality of life for those with chronic health problems
  • Self-awareness of health issues is at an all-time high, with thousands of consumer applications that enable management of the basics like weight control and nutrition, to chronic health issues like diabetes
  • Employers strongly promote health for their employees, both as a perk and a way to improve productivity
  • The attitude of healthcare institutions is changing from one of paternalism to patient- centric care and democratization of information

This level of access to care, information, and technology is undoubtedly beneficial, but it’s also scary. How does a person navigate all this stuff? If nothing else, healthcare was much simpler when we there were fewer things to think about.

First, take a deep breath and relax. For many people, the ability to take control of their own health and having so many resources at their disposal to do so is overwhelming. How does one even begin to consume their medical data, comprehend its meaning, and then take actions that improve their health?

The good news is that everyone is capable of taking the wheel and driving their own healthcare, be it physical fitness, managing a chronic illness, or navigating an acute health battle. The mission of the Nicolette empowerment blog is to empower people to do just that: take the wheel and drive.

When it comes to empowerment, it is important to do three things well:

  1. Understand Your Medical Data
  2. Research Relevant Health Topics
  3. Take the Correct Action

Each week our team will publish our suggestions for becoming empowered by developing each of these skills. We hope you will join our new community.