For Richard Taylor, a teacher of kids with serious illnesses at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, President Clinton's call, in his State of the Union address Tuesday, for wiring children's hospitals to the Internet was "perfect timing."
Like other cash-strapped teachers and administrators whose job it is to make sure hospitalized kids keep up with their schoolwork, Taylor is hoping the private sector will heed the president's words and help him add to his stable of two PCs.
"Computers are a major, major part of my program," he says. "It helps kids - many from hard-pressed areas of Chicago - feel a sense of accomplishment and success. Their eyes light up when they get email from classmates."
Private programs, like Steven Spielberg and retired General Norman Schwarzkopf's Starbright, provide children at major medical centers - such as Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University - with computers to communicate with one another, their classmates, families, and teachers. And a new project funded by Apple Computer called Convomania sets up monitored chats for hospitalized kids across the country.
"The goal is to create a tight community for children in hospitals. It's a therapeutic intervention to help them feel healthy again," says Debbie Fingerhut, instructor at Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach, California, whose facility enjoys a wealth of 10 Apple computers, a color printer, digital cameras, and "a ton of software" donated by Apple.
But the president's call for the private sector to connect "every children's hospital as soon as possible," while noble, is in truth only needed in a small number of children's hospitals specializing in long-term treatment for illnesses like cancer and severe burns. Instead, some pediatricians say, kids need the technology at home - as more hospitals, facing budgetary constraints, whittle inpatient time down to alarmingly short stays.
"As soon as you're looking a little like you can go home, you're out of there," said Dr. Andrew Spooner of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Children's Hospital, who's also a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "Most kids who pass through clinics won't need Internet access there; they'll need it at home."
This so-called "telemedicine" is in the nascent stages at medical facilities in Texas and Alaska to treat rural patients who don't have clinics nearby. But hospitals also want urbanites to take the technology home with them - through home IV lines, electronic blood-sugar monitors, and home computers hooked up to hospital databases.
At St. Mary's Hospital for Children in Bayside, New York, for example, the hospital is using the Internet to beat New York traffic jams and cut inpatient time by having home health-care workers teleport data from kids' homes to the central records department at the hospital.
"Hospital administrators are looking for ways other than the phone to get medical information from patients at home," Spooner said.
Lawrence A. McAndrews, president of the National Association of Children's Hospitals, sent a letter to President Clinton thanking him for mentioning children's hospitals in his State of the Union address. "Access to the information superhighway is yet another opportunity for a children's hospital to pursue its commitment to family-centered, community-based care," he wrote.
But as health-care providers push patients out of hospital doors sooner and sooner, kids may need home computers more than a laptop at every hospital bedside.
