The birth of a child is supposed to spark smiles and laughter, but Anna Wroble often sees different expressions in her line of work: teary eyes and worried brows. She’s a neonatal intensive care nurse at St. Rose Dominican Hospital; she helps newborns coping with health issues, from minor coughs to major birth defects. Those infants benefit from medical tech and specialist docs. But what about parents — worried, confused, frightened parents? Anna Wroble thought there should be an app for that.
“Stepping into the neonatal intensive care unit with a sick infant can be scary, and even traumatic, for most families. It’s a place with a lot of noise, monitors, pumps, alarms and all sort of things going on,” says Wroble. “I thought it would be useful if there were a smartphone app that gave parents a sense of what to expect — and what they could do to get some control.”
The catch: There’s no such app. So Wroble made one. She created Helping Mothers Helping Babies, a free app slated to hit virtual shelves this month for iPhone, Android and tablets. The app, a one-stop shop that covers the ins and outs of NICU, includes a video tour of St. Rose’s NICU unit, an infant health progress-tracker and extensive tips on breastfeeding. To turn her idea into software, Wroble was awarded $150,000 in grants, from Dignity Health’s Greenlight Challenge, St. Rose Dominican Siena campus, the Chandler Regional Medical Center in Arizona, and the Children’s Miracle Network.
“In my experience as a neonatal intensive care nurse, the biggest thing I hear from parents is that they feel out of control,” says Wroble, a nurse for 8 years. “Instead of telling them you can’t do this or that with this itty bitty fragile baby, we wanted to tell parents what they can do.” Wroble’s stake is partly personal, too. She’s the mother of four daughters, one of whom had to go into neonatal intensive care after birth.
Others at St. Rose chipped in. Jennifer McDonnell, director of communications for St. Rose Hospitals, came on as project manager — from a personal place as well. Her son was born prematurely and suffered from collapsed lungs shortly after birth. “For me, not understanding what was going on was very scary,” says McDonnell. “What’s exciting is that this is a grassroots app, not something we bought off the shelf and slapped a logo on.”
Indeed, Wroble leveraged her years of professional experience in creating Helping Mothers Helping Babies, and commissioned Dom & Tom, a New York-based app developer, to make it live on the screen.
“I’m passionate about being a nurse, and about being a mother,” says Wroble. “If one family’s fears are calmed, and they learn something, and they feel like they’ve gotten some sense of control of circumstances, the app is a success to me.”