YARDLEY, PA, January 17, 2023— Astarte Medical, a clinical intelligence company, announced today it has signed a contract with UVA Children’s to implement its NICUtrition® software platform to analyze and understand feeding metrics and milestones and the corresponding growth outcomes for preterm infants in the neonatal ICU (NICU).
More than 380,000 infants in the U.S. are born preterm annually, surviving as early as 22 weeks gestational age. As survival rates for extremely preterm infants improve, attention is now turning to the quality of survival. Optimal nutrition early in life can positively impact not only physical growth, but neurological development as well. Despite accumulating research and increased knowledge of preterm infant nutritional needs, a lack of resources, shared knowledge and time has allowed optimizing feeding practices and nutritional management in the NICU to remain a major challenge for clinicians.
NICUtrition® is a real-time clinical decision support tool designed to address the challenges clinicians face with feeding practices and nutrition management, like malnutrition, suboptimal growth, poor outcomes, and racial disparities in care. NICUtrition provides real-time feedback pertaining to the implementation of enteral feeding protocols and compliance monitoring. NICUtrition directly interfaces with the electronic medical record and provides an intuitive presentation of feeding, nutrition, and growth-related data allowing for the calculation and visualization of milestones and metrics in real time that have previously only been available in large, time-consuming retrospective studies.
UVA Children's is a nationally ranked, acute care children's hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. It is affiliated with the University of Virginia School of Medicine. UVA Children’s operates a 51-bed Level III neonatal intensive care unit. “UVA Children’s is an ideal partner given their prioritization of optimal nutrition to improve outcomes for preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit,” said Tracy Warren, CEO of Astarte Medical. “Moreover, the NICU team is committed to the adoption of innovative tools that can access nuanced, comprehensive feeding data and inform evidence-based care models.”
Astarte Medical and UVA Children’s came together through the KidsX Accelerator, a program that brings together the top children’s hospitals and talented digital health companies to build, test and deploy software solutions to make pediatric care exceptionally effective, safe, efficient, and convenient for children and families. The KidsX Accelerator supports early-stage digital health companies to achieve product and business model validation in the pediatric market. www.kidsx.health.
About Astarte Medical Astarte Medical is a clinical intelligence company providing digital solutions to support nutrition and feeding practices and protocol-driven care across pediatric populations. Its first product, NICUtrition® improves growth and clinical outcomes for preterm infants and impacts critical performance metrics for hospitals. Visit astartemedical.com and nicutrition.com for more information.