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The Infantorium

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67 pointsneonate11 comments

So our new baby came out two months early and had to spend six weeks in the NICU. The local hospital had just built this NICU so it was of the latest design. Instead of rows of incubators, every family gets their own little room (twins share, triplets+ get multiple rooms). The room has a couch, incubator, sink and rocking chair. This NICU costs about $100 every hour your baby is in there. Our feed/change/weigh cycle was every four hours. The nurses will handle it if you are not there. Doctors and med students did rounds twice a day.

If baby is too small to nurse they are fed via a nose tube and syringe pump. Dinner options include formula, donated or BYOB human milk, and special concentrated human milk with vitamins. If baby is not doing well they can feed via IV. It is not easy to get an IV into a tiny baby, but they manage.

This design does make it harder for the nurses to keep an eye on all the babies so they rely on the vital signs monitoring equipment a lot. They measure HR, blood O2, respiration and skin temp. They can get alerts in room A if baby in room B vitals drop. There is also a cell phone thing they can watch vitals on if they are away from the rooms for some reason.

You don't really get to see the other babies, and sadly there are no carnival games. It did feel a bit isolating but this system does have advantages, each room can be turned into an OR if required and germ transmission is reduced.

They can handle very small babies, down to 24weeks. They have diapers the size of postage stamps for the little ones. The ward had 30+ babies when we were there and not one death the whole six weeks. Pretty good.

Just wanted to say our baby came two months early and spent six weeks in the NICU as well. This was a little over a year ago.

She was fed through a nose tube for a while. We got to watch her on a web cam when we couldn't be at the hospital. But it was a "medical grade" web cam and was pretty bad all around.

The NICU had two large rooms, one for new entries and one for more stable babies. The large rooms had some nice aspects. They allowed us to socialize with other parents going through the same thing. That was helpful. It was also helpful to see the flow of babies out of the NICU as they get better. It also had some drawbacks: one baby was born much earlier than ours and the mother suffered a great deal, and did so rather publicly because of the open room.

You described your baby as new, so I just wanted to say our baby is doing amazingly and I hope things are going well for you and your family.

Is BYOB in this context "bring your own boobs"?

While it may be harder for the nurses to watch all the babies together, it's exacerbated by the fact that they're overworked and understaffed. It's crazy that with all the costs, staff is still in this position. This goes double for the ambulance staff that are constantly in high stress situations but get paid even less.

It could also be Bring Your Own Breastmilk, or Breastfeed Your Own Baby. The hospital seems quite flexible in that regard.

Or still just "bring your own bottle"

> So our new baby came out two months early and had to spend six weeks in the NICU. [...] This NICU costs about $100 every hour your baby is in there.

Sorry, so the bill was $100,800? I'm from the USA and... I know... should be used to this savagery by now, but wow. This makes me jealous of my counterparts living in countries with civilized health care systems, and extremely grateful that my own daughter was born on time and healthy. I could barely afford the (post-insurance) multi-thousand dollar bill I was charged for a normal delivery!

That's just the NICU expenses. If your baby needed any procedures (e.g. MRIs), that would likely be in addition to that. Both my kids spent ~3 weeks in NICU, bill for everything (entirely covered by insurance except for $100 co-pay!) was ~$90K for one and ~125K for the other IIRC, but a substantial fraction of those were related to the long and complicated deliveries. I think about half of those bills was the NICU and half was delivery/other procedures.

The total bill for our kiddo's 37 day stay in NICU was ~$400,000 including hospital charges, doctors, and tests. That doesn't include the delivery which was billed under my wife's stuff. Her bill was ~$100,000 for a 3 week stay (high blood pressure plus other factors).

After 30 days our state's Medicaid program decided that she was a household of 1 and paid for everything our normal insurance didn't, and continues to pay secondary for everything she needs because she has a rare medical condition.

Dealt with the same thing recently(two months early, 6 weeks nicu) and the final bill was 1.5 mil.

Insurance haggled them down to ~750k. I paid $500.

Our kiddo was born 6 weeks early and spent 37 days in NICU about a year ago. Ours was much as you described, except for the last half of it she was in a room that was about the same size as a normal hospital room and her nurse was watching 3 kids instead of 2. The hospital she was at has 52 NICU beds total and every single one of them was full the entire time.

During the first half of her stay she was in the high-level NICU ward. Still private rooms but much smaller and 2 to 1 nursing coverage. While she was there there were a handful of babies on ECMO (basically external blood oxygenation), which is terrifying as a parent.

This was, roughly, the design of the University of Washington NICU about 3 years ago.

We really liked it. We did not consider the nursing to be understaffed at this point in time - we consider the NICU staff and facilities to be some of, if not the best, medical care we've ever seen.

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