Exploring Nemours' pediatric at-home care program

How the Advanced Care at Home program works

Chris Beaty, Nemours' vice president of operational innovation, described the Advanced Care at Home program as a virtual, technology-enabled care model. Through the program, pediatric patients who are medically stable but still require care can be discharged to their homes. Here, patients and their families receive virtual visits and RPM-supported services.

Various pediatric populations can benefit from this type of at-home care. For example, infants cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) after birth often require additional support even after they are deemed ready to go home, Beaty said. The program enables hospital care teams to continue to support the baby's development at home.

"And what's super cool about this is we can customize the technology package and the level of intensity in support that we can provide in the home setting," he said.

He added that the hospital can provide a Bluetooth-enabled weight scale to parents, allowing them to weigh their baby at home, so the care team can remotely track whether the baby is meeting weight milestones. Or, for babies who require feeding through a tube, care teams can virtually check in on the babies and their families, offering re-education on how to manage the tube.

Clinicians also perform virtual rounding, conducting visual assessments and answering questions, until the child is ready to "graduate" from the program and transition to outpatient services, Beaty shared.

How the program is benefiting patients and families

The at-home care program offers patients the option of recovering in familiar surroundings, which benefits both patients and their families.

"Kids do better when they're eating their own food, interacting with their siblings, playing in their home, sleeping in their own bed," Beaty said. "Families do better when they're not burdened with having to take time off at work and/or transportation to the hospital while caring for their other children. So, this just makes sense."

The program has cared for more than 120 patients since its launch in June 2025. According to hospital data, it has prevented 27 inpatient readmissions and 91 emergency department visits. Mericle noted that the program enables the Nemours team to provide wraparound care to patients, tracking their progress and escalating their care. For instance, pediatric patients can also virtually connect with specialists if needed.

"Our ultimate goal in this program was quality and safety," Mericle said.

While the patient outcomes data is significant, Mericle also highlighted the benefits that are not as easily measurable.

"I can't underestimate the stress on parents bringing a baby or a child home from a hospital where they're getting 24/7 care and all of a sudden, [they're home] -- our parents will tell us that they have felt pretty alone and pretty anxious," she said. "But when they know that they can call us and immediately get either a nurse or a provider, and we can escalate care as necessary…I think that what our families are telling us is that it really allows them to relax a bit."

How Nemours overcame implementation challenges

At-home care programs for children differ from those for adults in various ways. One of the primary differences is that pediatric programs require workflows that involve the family, rather than just the individual patient.

"The families are the voice of their child," Beaty said. "And so, oftentimes, we are not only having to provide a level of support and assessment of the child in the home, but we're also having to provide additional support for the family in the home."

For Nemours, providing this comprehensive support meant focusing on overarching capabilities, rather than building condition-specific pathways. Mericle noted that implementing at-home care programs for children can be risky because they are vulnerable and their conditions can change quickly.

Thus, the hospital focused on the logistical capabilities to enable virtual visits and RPM, such as Bluetooth-enabled devices and dependable audio-visual technology. These capabilities, combined with family-oriented education and escalation protocols, enable the hospital to provide whatever care the child needs, regardless of their condition, Mericle said.

Additionally, to ensure high-quality and safe care in the home, the hospital conducted simulations of the patient and family journey through the program.

"We identified any challenges and then mapped out an algorithm to overcome that challenge before we sent a patient home," said Beaty. "That was really, really important as we were working through this model."

On the provider side, the hospital set up an operations center for the Advanced Care at Home program. The center is modeled after the hospital's Clinical Logistics Center, which manages inpatient care. Virtual clinicians staff the operations center for the at-home care program, overseeing the RPM devices and virtual care data on a centralized platform.

With the launch of the Advanced Care at Home program, Nemours plans to implement additional at-home care services as well.

Beaty shared that the hospital plans to launch a home phototherapy program in 2026. This program will focus on NICU babies with jaundice. Those infants in a stable condition will be discharged to their homes, where they will receive virtual phototherapy services, which involve using special blue-green lights to break down bilirubin in the skin.

"We will be providing in-home support and assessments twice a day through the journey at home for their phototherapy," he said. "We'll be launching that program in the Delaware Valley in early 2026 and quickly spreading that to our Orlando market."

Mericle hopes that these efforts will pave the way for more at-home options for children across the nation.

"I think, eventually, we're hopefully going to see that only the sickest of kids will need the hospitals and that we can do a lot of our care for our children right in their homes," she said.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and digital therapeutics.