JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions of newborns are emotional and stressful for parents, influencing their mental and physical wellbeing and resulting in high rates of psychological morbidities. Significant research has been undertaken to understand and quantify the burden of a newborn’s medical journey on parents’ wellbeing. Simultaneously, an increase is observed in the development and implementation of telemedicine interventions, defined as remote delivery of health care. Telemedicine is used as an overarching term for different technological interventions grouped as real-time audio-visual communication, remote patient monitoring, and asynchronous communication. Various telemedicine interventions have been proposed and developed, but scarcely with the primary goal of improving the parental wellbeing during their newborn’s medical journey.

Objective:

This study aims to identify telemedicine interventions with the potential to improve parents’ wellbeing and present how their experience is measured.

Methods:

A scoping review was conducted, including empirical studies evaluating telemedicine in neonatal care that either measured parental wellbeing or included parents in the evaluation. Abstract and title screening, full text screening and data extraction was performed by three researchers. Two researchers were needed to reach decisions on both inclusion and extraction.

Results:

The review included 50 out of 737 screened articles. Telemedicine interventions focused mainly on daily visits at the NICU and discharge preparedness for parents. Surveys were the primary tool used for outcome measurement (77%). Aspects of parents’ wellbeing were evaluated in 66% of the studies. Telemedicine interventions developed to provide education and support showed potential to improve self-efficacy and discharge preparedness, and decrease anxiety and stress when they included a real-time telemedicine component.

Conclusions:

This scoping review identified specific telemedicine interventions, such as real-time audio-visual communication and eHealth applications, that have the potential to improve parental wellbeing by enhancing self-efficacy, discharge preparedness, and reducing anxiety and stress. However, more insights are needed to understand how these interventions affect wellbeing. Parents should be included in future research in both the development and evaluation stage. It is important to measure not only parents’ perception but focus on the impact of a telemedicine intervention on their wellbeing. Clinical Trial: N/A