Essential Care for Every Baby: Neonatal Clinical Decision Support Tool

Abstract

Unacceptably high rates of neonatal mortality are an urgent global health challenge. Consistent application of Essential Newborn Care (ENC) interventions reduce newborn mortality. However, ENC has failed to scale-up in low-middle income countries, where the bulk of neonatal deaths occur. The American Academy of Pediatrics designed an evidence-based, simplified training and educational curriculum called Essential Care for Every Baby (ECEB), which includes a clinical practice guideline for the time of delivery through 24 h after birth. However, the scale-up of ECEB has been hampered by the need to provide a wide variety of time-sensitive ECEB interventions to numerous mother-baby pairs. This incurs significant cognitive load among providers who perform varied tasks every few minutes for each baby. In this high-load, stressful situation, there are often profound gaps in the delivery of crucial ECEB strategies. We propose an innovative, scalable, clinical decision support mobile app which prioritizes recognition over recall and addresses existing challenges.