Designing for both Parent and Child: How 5 Hospitals Brought Digital Care Journeys into Pediatrics

Pediatrics has always been one of the harder problems in digital health. The patient is a child. The user, most of the time, is a parent. And the emotional stakes – a nervous five-year-old heading into surgery, a parent trying to recall pages of discharge instructions at midnight – are higher than almost any adult care scenario.

Five innovative hospitals carved a path forward despite these challenges. Oak Valley Health, North Bay Regional Health Centre, Niagara Health, Sault Area Hospital, and London Health Sciences Centre have all recently expanded their digital care journey initiatives, powered by SeamlessMD, into paediatric populations - for example for tonsillectomies and paediatric trauma. 

All five had already deployed SeamlessMD successfully for a variety of adult surgical patients – covering dozens of programs such as orthopedics, general surgery, urology, women’s health, cancer care and more – before making this move into pediatrics.

How digital care journeys work

SeamlessMD is a digital care journey platform that guides patients – and in pediatrics, their caregivers – through complex journeys, such as pre/post-surgery, chronic disease management, cancer treatment and more. Families access the program through an integrated text/email/app-based platform that delivers step-by-step education, reminders, symptom check-ins, and real-time guidance. Care teams can monitor patient progress and symptom flags remotely and reach out when it matters most.

In adult care, there's one patient and one device. In pediatrics, it's more complicated.

Two audiences in one program

Building a digital care program for paediatrics means thinking about two very different people at once: the child getting care (e.g. a surgical procedure) and the adult responsible for getting them through recovery safely.

SeamlessMD's patient education team writes content at a grade 6 reading level. That's not dumbing it down – it's a practical choice that keeps material accessible to older children while making sure parents can read, process, and share it quickly. An anxious parent at 11pm who can't parse their discharge instructions is as much of a care gap as a patient who never received them.

The programs also address the emotional side of paediatrics directly. For example, for surgery, there's content on helping a child manage anxiety before and after a procedure, and on managing the parent's own anxiety alongside it. For a family preparing for a tonsillectomy, feeling prepared is a clinical outcome. Knowing what to expect matters.

Oak Valley Health took it a step further. They integrated video content from their Dr. Bear Program directly into the SeamlessMD experience, which includes short clips that walk young patients through what they'll see when they arrive for their procedure. Familiar faces, familiar spaces. It's a simple way to take the edge off the unknown before it becomes a problem in the room.

Where the clinical stakes are highest

For tonsillectomy patients, the critical moments are predictable: the pre-op window, where eating and drinking instructions have real safety implications, and the post-op stretch, where pain management and hydration take over.

Keeping kids hydrated after a tonsillectomy matters more than it sounds. Hydration supports healing directly – a moist throat recovers faster. But convincing a child in pain to drink is genuinely hard, and parents often need more than one conversation to manage it well over several days at home. Repeated, timely guidance through a digital program changes what's achievable without a phone call every time uncertainty spikes.

That was the primary goal: cut the volume of parent calls driven by common questions and post-op worry.

Healthcare organizations are already seeing early success

Activation rates across the paediatric tonsillectomy programs are above 90%. Among families who completed the program, 88% said they would recommend it to others. More than 90% reported feeling more confident before their child's procedure and through recovery.

One parent's feedback gets at what these programs are actually trying to do:

‍“The fact that we had on-demand help and knew every day if we were on track with recovery or not was very beneficial.”

Not education delivered once and forgotten. Ongoing guidance through a recovery that most families handle largely on their own.

What makes this worth noting

Most digital health programs are designed with adult patients in mind. Moving into pediatrics takes more than flipping a switch – it requires different language, a different emotional register, and a genuine acknowledgment that the caregiver is often the one holding the phone.

These five hospitals knew SeamlessMD worked for their adult patients. They extended that confidence somewhere more challenging: a population digital health has largely passed over. The programs are live, families are using them, and the early returns are significant.