A team of leaders in digital media technology has come together at Cincinnati Children’s to revolutionize the patient-family experience by building on their past successes with an interactive mobile app focused on heart defects.

Ryan Moore, MD, co-developer of Heartpedia and director, Cardiac Digital Media, and David Morales, MD, director, Congenital Heart Surgery, have built on their partnership with Cincinnati Children’s MediaLab, led by Ken Tegtmeyer, MD, and lead animator Jeff Cimprich, to create a series of surgical animations aimed to better educate patients, families and other medical professionals about congenital heart disease and its associated procedures.

The first phase involved using digital models to create an app called Heartpedia, which allows users to view various congenital heart defects in a 3-D, interactive format. With more than 50,000 downloads, the app is proving a popular tool for practitioners and patients alike, enhancing understanding of the heart’s anatomy and the defects that can occur within.

The project’s next phase has taken the 3-D models a step further. Over the past year, the team has worked to create animated videos of heart repairs for the most common congenital heart defects. Each video walks the viewer through a cardiac procedure from beginning to end, complete with a narrated explanation and a pre- and post-repair comparison.

“We show the parents a 3-D model of the heart condition their baby is born with and let them interact with it – by turning it and going inside of it – and then go through an animation of their child’s operation step by step,” says Morales.

The team aims to reduce the anxiety that families have about procedures, as well as to empower them with a level of education not previously available to them. The ultimate goal is to increase family satisfaction and improve informed consent.

Now the animations are being built into an app called HeartConsent. This app will allow families to view the procedure their child will undergo from any mobile device, giving them the ability to provide an informed consent. With HeartConsent, the family will also have a personalized reference tool for their child’s operation and one that can be shared with friends and family. The hope is that moving forward, the experience and education about congenital heart disease and its associated surgeries will drastically improve.

The team has completed 10 videos, with more underway. A prospective study is in the works to explore how this consent process affects the patient and family experience.

“We want families to have the best possible experience here,” Moore says. “For many families, when it comes to medical procedures a higher level of understanding equals a higher comfort level. Our goal is for these tools to provide families with an extra level of understanding so they can be as comfortable as possible during such a stressful time.”

The Heartpedia app is available for download on Apple and Android devices.