High Ratings For Kare Mom In Both App Stores

Since going live in 2017, the Kare Mom app has received a positive response. Our iOS app rating is 4.8 out of 5 stars (84 ratings), and our Android app rating is 4.9 out of 5 stars (57 ratings), which is especially impressive for a cross-platform app.

Google Play App Store

Apple App Store

The Kare Mom app was designed with moms, to overcome the challenges of having their babies in the NICU and having to produce breast milk. How do we achieve these goals?

The app helps moms initiate pumping, maintain a pumping schedule, stay motivated to pump, and stimulates breast milk production with a variety of biometric cues.

After mom logs a new pumped bottle, she is prompted to set a reminder for her next pumping session. Mom can see how much milk she has produced by volume, bottles and sessions on a dynamic, easy to read chart. Scrolling through user reviews in the app stores, we see moms often describe how helpful and motivating the lactation analytics are for their pumping journeys.

Recent User Reviews (Google Play App Store)

Moms can see how many bottles of milk are in the hospital at any time. That window into the NICU provides a huge sense of relief — “one less stress”, “reassurance”, and “help ease the worries”. Clinicians notice the number of calls from parents reduce, because they don’t need to ask about inventory or what happened overnight. Nurse administrators can set reminders so each mom receives push notifications if her milk inventory dips below a set threshold.

“Health care has long empowered patients to advocate for themselves and their health, but patients and their families will take – and demand – a growing role in the move toward safer care,” says Anne Marie Benedicto, Vice President at Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. In her forward looking piece, 2020 Vision: More Engagement, Less Harm, Benedicto describes a shift from recognizing the patient-family’s voice to actually giving them a key role in care.

Recent User Reviews (Apple App Store)

That shift is why Kare Mom is necessary. Many apps help moms track their pumping production. But Kare Mom allows parents to be active and useful members of the care team. It is an experience more families are coming to expect. And it helps high reliability healthcare organizations achieve “zero harm”.

Generally, lactation consultants have access to the real-time lactation analytics to track mom’s pumping patterns and production. Each hospital can decide how LCs use the secure chat feature — i.e. actively to coach, passively to respond, a touchpoint between appointments. The chat feature is intuitive and feels like modern in-app messaging with push notifications. LCs and moms connect almost instantly. It eliminates the difficulty LCs normally have meeting moms in person or over the phone.

The #1 feature moms praise in their user reviews is photo sharing. Normally, nurses send one photo per shift to a mom after her baby is fed. Sharing photos is another biometric cue that helps stimulate milk production — 83mls more milk pumped per day on average. In the comments, receiving a photo it’s often described as the “highlight of the day” for families eager to welcome their babies home.

All of these cues help stimulate milk production, and knowing when to act. Knowing when to pump, tracking pumping patterns and production, anticipating when to bring in more milk, watching the inventory reduce, chatting with LCs, and receiving pictures of their fed baby. With Kare Mom, they know.

NICUs using the Kare Mom app in ways we never imagined.

One NICU doubled down on using the Kare Mom app to educate and motivate moms to pump more milk. Initially, the NICU used Kare Mom’s push notification feature to promote a 24-hour “pumping challenge”. It turns out there was a significant increase in total breast milk pumped during the challenge. That outcome inspired the clinical team to create a “Breastmilk Pump-a-thon” series of events during World Breastfeeding Week..

Looking back, the NICU discovered the average monthly volume of breast milk pumped during 2018 was 180,759mls by 50 moms.

The week long pump-a-thon was in August of 2018. The pump-a-thon yielded a 56% increase in breast milk pump during the month of August. The monthly total volume of breast milk pumped was 282,180mls by 47 moms -- which was an increase of 101,421mls.

We love motivating moms and making their pumping experiences better. It is especially rewarding to see how this NICU used our technology to develop a unique experience for their moms and to increase their breast milk output. We are excited to see what our children’s hospital and NICU partners in 2020 do with this platform. Which initiatives do you want to try? What goals do you want to achieve? Let’s talk about it.