Thursday, January 12, 2017

Children's Hospital - Annual Cyber Santa Visit



Every year I help organize a cyber visit with Santa for the patents at a Children's Hospital. This is an event that is always a fun distraction for patients and families going thru a difficult time.


This event originally started as a nationwide program supported by Cisco Systems but at some point they ended national support and our local Cisco account team personally stepped up and continued the program at our hospital along with out local IT and Child Life staff.


As we approach the Christmas holiday Santa Clause is as expected a very busy fellow. Using collaboration and wireless technologies he is able to have personal one on one visit with children in the hospital by using portable wireless devices (tablets), video collaboration services (Cisco Spark, Skype, etc) and a wireless network. When we have ambulatory patients we try to use a conference room with a large screen TV to enable the children to visit with Santa along with their families and siblings. To visit with non ambulatory and patients that can't leave their rooms for various reasons we use a wireless tablet device. The tablet makes it easy to bring the visit right to the bed for the patient and can also be easily sanitized or bagged for protection of the patient. As we progress room to room with the tablet Santa also gets to visit with the nursing staff. They always get a kick out of Santa and always make sure to put in the gift requests!


Don't ignore proper security practice and patient confidentiality!
It is extremely important to protect our patients. Meetings and review by cyber and patient privacy help develop all the proper procedures and sign-off for our patient's participation in this event. These meetings happen months in advance to ensure a successful event. We also review media releases with patient's parents so we do not violate any patient's parental wishes.


Below is a sample of some of the coverage by the media.
Penn State Health youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utAT3wifivw

Penn State News
http://news.psu.edu/story/383128/2015/12/02/santa-makes-cyber-stop-penn-state-hershey-children%E2%80%99s-hospital

Event made national coverage on ABC in 2014
http://abcnews.go.com/US/cyber-santa-claus-connects-patients-pennsylvania-childrens-hospital/story?id=27359975

Local abc27 Coverage
http://abc27.com/2014/12/03/cyber-santa-connects-with-children-at-penn-state-hershey-childrens-hospital/




 I hope this article helps you think how you can use your skills as an IT professional to the benefit the community you service.