This story was contributed by our friends at the Nebraska Business Development Center (NBDC) and written by Nick Schinker.

A phone call sends you and your family into shock. A loved one has been admitted to the intensive care unit at a local hospital and is unable to speak due to their condition. You need to come right away. There are decisions to be made.

The next few hours, days and even weeks are difficult and confusing. You need to make decisions regarding treatment, but the doctors, specialists, and other caregivers asking the questions are experts. You try to make sense of everything they say, but the medical terms they use are like a foreign language. The stress becomes overwhelming.

Breanna Hetland, PhD, RN, CCRN, has seen this many times professionally in her 14 years as a critical care nurse, as families struggle to comprehend medical terminology and treatments. She also has experienced it personally, during a medical event with her father in 2013, when he suffered a brain stem stroke.

“He and my mother seemingly had all the resources and knowledge to make informed decisions, but they were still lost,” she recalls. “I started thinking then that we need something in place to help patients and families understand and make better decisions. It felt like a calling.”

Since that time, Hetland has been working to create a handy, user-friendly way to alleviate the stress and confusion of these hospital situations. Hetland is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Nursing. She also is a nurse scientist at Nebraska Medicine in the Critical Care Division and Innovation Design Unit.

With Greg Nelson, Hetland has created a mobile app called Family Room. It’s a digital platform to promote patient and family involvement in care during acute hospitalization. “Family Room is a mobile resource that is like having a nurse in your pocket,” she says.

The project has received more than $900,000 in research grants, including funds from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Betty Irene Moore Foundation and the State of Nebraska, and is in the design-and-build phase. Clinical trials are anticipated to begin in May 2024.

Hetland initially conducted extensive interviews with stakeholders to gain a collection of experiences. “I wanted to know what they felt as a patient and as family,” she says.

“So many said they felt like a number in the system, and that they not only didn’t understand everything they were told, they didn’t even know what questions to ask.”

Hetland says the Family Room app is designed to provide the infrastructure so patients and family members can participate in care in a meaningful, informed way. “It’s more than a glossary of terms,” she says. “It’s a dynamic educational tool.”

“For example, the user can click on a photo of a piece of equipment, learn what it does, and hear how it sounds. You can click on a clinical character and learn what that person’s job is.”

Beyond an educational tool, the Family Room supports the user emotionally through a better understanding of their particular situation. And, Hetland says, it encourages family member involvement by providing an opportunity for them to report the care they provide to the patient through the electronic health record so clinicians can see their contributions in real time.

She says the goal for Family Room is to empower and engage family caregivers in patient care, enhance quality of care and safety, increase satisfaction and lower overall health care costs.

“I want Family Room to help families in the decision-making process and give them a more holistic experience,” she says. “It’s not a problem you know you have until you are so far into the experience. In such stressful circumstances—Family Room can have a profound impact.”

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The Nebraska Business Development Center (NBDC) helps Nebraska businesses start, grow, and develop, by strengthening Nebraska businesses for a healthy economy and prosperous communities. NBDC is a University of Nebraska at Omaha center that provides confidential consulting business development services across Nebraska to entrepreneurs and business owners for the life cycle of their business. NBDC partners with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska at Kearney, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Wayne State College, and Chadron State College to deliver its services statewide. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the U.S. Department of Commerce (EDA), and other federal, state, and private organizations support NBDC. The APEX Accelerator is funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the Department of Defense. Visit nbdc.unomaha.edu for more information.