Implementing Telemedicine for Neonatal Care: Tutorial on a Practical Toolkit Based on Multinational Experience

Real-time audiovisual connections between health care providers (HCPs) in neonatal care, known as TeleNeonatology (TeleNeo), can improve neonatal care. For patients and families, TeleNeo was found to improve patient outcomes and facilitate family-integrated and patient-centered care by ensuring timely access to expert involvement regardless of location, which can strengthen trust and reassurance. For clinicians and health care organizations, TeleNeo enables expert decision-making, fosters continuous professional development, promotes knowledge exchange between hospitals, and increases staff confidence in managing complex medical cases. However, organizational, technical, and infrastructural requirements can hinder successful implementation and sustained adoption of technological interventions, such as TeleNeo. Implementation can be time-consuming and may fail due to the challenges encountered during the implementation process, particularly when incorporating the intervention into existing workflows across multiple hospitals. Nevertheless, there are case studies that demonstrate successful implementation of TeleNeo into routine care. Informed by international experience and theoretical underpinnings of implementation science, this tutorial presents a toolkit to provide step-by-step guidance for health care institutions considering TeleNeo implementation. The objective of the toolkit is to help health care organizations effectively and efficiently implement TeleNeo in their neonatal care pathways. The toolkit provides a structured guide that encompasses the entire implementation process, from initial ideas to stakeholder engagement, workflow design, and program evaluation. It includes checklists, planning guidelines, and tools to help teams design a customized implementation strategy for their institution.