Practical Tutorial and Toolkit for Implementing Telemedicine for Neonatal Care: A Multinational Experience (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Real-time audiovisual connections between healthcare providers (HCP) in neonatal care, known as TeleNeonatology (or TeleNeo for short), have the potential to improve neonatal care. For patients and families, TeleNeo improves patient outcomes, facilitates family-integrated and patient-centred care by ensuring timely access to expert involvement regardless of location, which can strengthen trust and reassurance. For clinicians and healthcare organizations, TeleNeo enables expert decision-making, fosters continuous professional development, promotes knowledge exchange between hospitals, and increases staff confidence in managing complex medical cases. However, organizational, technical and infrastructural requirements can hinder successful implementation and sustained adoption of technological interventions, such as TeleNeo. Implementation can be time-consuming and may fail due to the challenges encountered during the implementation process, particularly incorporating the intervention into existing workflows across multiple hospitals. Nevertheless, there are case studies that demonstrate successful implementation of TeleNeo into routine care. Informed by international experience, this paper presents a toolkit to provide step-by-step guidance for healthcare institutions considering TeleNeo implementation. The objective of the toolkit is to help healthcare organizations effectively and efficiently implement TeleNeo in their neonatal care pathways. The toolkit provides a structured guide that encompasses the entire implementation process, from the initial ideas to stakeholder engagement, workflow design, and program evaluation. It includes checklists, planning guidelines and tools to help teams design a customized implementation strategy for their institution.