Nutrition Is Essential, But Complicated

Optimal nutritional management is paramount to improve pediatric outcomes but data access, resource constraints, and lack of national standards impair clinicians' ability to delivery high quality care on a consistent basis.

It is well established that poor nutrition has substantial impact on health, yet assessing nutritional status, developing evidence-based feeding plans, and monitoring progress and outcomes is frought with challenges.

Highly Heterogeneric Population with Complex Needs

Difficulty Accessing EMR Data to Support Decision-making

Lack of National Standards or Evidence-based Guidelines

Limited Access to Nutritional Expertise (RDNs)

Inconsistent and variable nutritional care results in poor health outcomes for neonatal and pediatric patients including poor growth and development, increased time on ventilation, delayed healing, longer lengths of stay, and higher readmission rates.

Unique, Complex Feeding and Nutrition Challenges

Liberating granular EMR data to support decision-making—regardless of access to experts—will improve outcomes for various vulnerable pediatric patient populations.

Preterm Infants and NICU Babies

Fear of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) or concerns of intolerance create variability in feeding practices and result in suboptimal nutrition management, impacting growth and brain development. Decisions of how to feed, when to feed, how to advance (or not) feedings have become increasingly complex and research continues to show considerable variation in outcomes, making standardization of feeding more and more difficult.

Driving standardization in the delivery of parenteral (IV) and enteral nutrition can address poor growth and inconsistent outcomes for NICU infants and increase confidence of clincial teams in their decision making.

Neonates and Infants with Congenital Heart Defect (CHD)

The importance of nutrition in managing critically ill infants with congenital heart defect (CHD) is foundational to optimizing short- and long-term health outcomes. Growth failure and malnutrition are common in infants with CHD.

A dearth of high-quality studies and gaps in previously published guidelines have led to wide variability in nutrition practices that are locally driven. There is a pressing need to improve surgical outcomes by providing adequate pre and post op nutrition for CHD patients.

Gut Health in First 1000 Days

The first 1000 days of life, from conception to age two, is the most critical time for brain, body, metabolism, and immune system development. It is also the time of most rapid change in the microbiome and therefore provides a unique window of opportunity for intervention. However, feeding practices and nutritional targets today are largely based on an infant’s age or weight, not accounting for microbial differences and influences.

Approaches today do not include molecular, genomic and microbiomic details, which add “precision” and “individualization” opportunities. The ability to offer precision nutrition during this time will have a profound impact on an infant’s ability to grow, learn and thrive.

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Nutrition Is Essential, But Complicated

It is well established that poor nutrition has substantial impact on health, yet assessing nutritional status, developing evidence-based feeding plans, and monitoring progress and outcomes is frought with challenges.

Highly Heterogeneric Population with Complex Needs

Difficulty Accessing EMR Data to Support Decision-making

Lack of National Standards or Evidence-based Guidelines

Limited Access to Nutritional Expertise (RDNs)

Inconsistent and variable nutritional care results in poor health outcomes for neonatal and pediatric patients including poor growth and development, increased time on ventilation, delayed healing, longer lengths of stay, and higher readmission rates.

Unique, Complex Feeding and Nutrition Challenges

What Are The Biggest Challenges In Your Unit?