Cedars Sinai's video conferencing system

University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital has launched a digital system that allows parents to keep an eye on their newborns who are in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), according to a news segment aired on CBS Minneapolis.

The hospital's manager of patient/family interactive services, Jason Albrecht, initially started trying to email pictures of the babies to their parents, but stopped because the system wasn't secure enough. He then helped to set up a system using iPads, one in the parents' rooms and one in the babies' rooms so that the families can stay connected.

"The challenge is [to] make this as simple as possible," Albrecht told CBS. "We have been able to find a technology solution that helps us to connect moms and babies, dads and babies, no matter where they have to be. The technology that we have in place here is all very secure and private so families get a password that they log into their own virtual chatroom and they can share that with anybody that they want to share that information with. And then they can connect on their own so we can talk about medical needs and issues so they can talk about that as well."

He added that the technology costs are around $2,400, but there's the added expense of keeping the system up and running.

"Some moms will choose to have this on 24-7 and some will just check in now and then to talk with the nurse and find out who is caring for their child," Albrecht said. "And being able to see and hear is the next best thing to actually being there."

In early 2013, the nurses at Cedars-Sinai discussed a similar system. They used unmodified iPads running Apple’s FaceTime to offer mothers the option to see their premature or sick babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) even if they were immobile while recovering from delivery or the infants were in isolation. The hospital named this service BabyTime.