NicoBoard app – propelled by grief, a father develops a tool for NICU parents

Phil Martie used his background in business process improvement to create an app that helps parents navigate the tough times spent in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). His journey started when one of his newborn twins passed away during surgery. Before the fatality, he and his wife noticed subtle changes in the shape of their daughters’ stomach but were told that was something normal. The reality is their daughter, Nicolette, had an intestinal perforation and when she went to the operating room the condition had already progressed. Phil felt that if he fully comprehended the swirl of data and information he received about his baby’s health, he would have insisted that something was not right. So, after the tragedy, Phil’s desire to support the community of fellow NICU parents was immense.

With the help of M.D. Michel Mikhael and Seth Brickman, Phil created a health tech company, fondly called Nicolette to pay homage to his late daughter. They launched its first product in 2020, an app called NicoBoard, and Children's Health of Orange County (CHOC), a pediatric healthcare system based in California, was the first organization to implement this technology.

NicoBoard is a tablet-based application that converts overwhelming data from a patient’s electronic medical record (body temperature, weight gain, oxygen saturation, etc.) into simple sentences supported by visual aids like graphs and charts. Additionally, it provides information that supplements more in-depth conversations with the medical care team. The system also has a space for parents to journal and document their baby’s experiences and milestones, which can be shared with family and friends.

This story was adapted from: https://www.freethink.com/health/nicoboard-nicu-parents and https://health.choc.org/nico-board-a-new-tool-to-empower-choc-nicu-parents/

The images were taken from: https://nicolette.com/, as we do not own any of them.

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