Stamford Hospital is the first in Connecticut and metro New York area to offer mothers and families a unique way to increase the safety and security of their newborn babies. The “Infant Safety System,” developed by Stamford-based CertaScan Technologies, allows delivery staff at the hospital to bypass the old method of ink and paper – instead quickly capturing high resolution images of a newborn’s footprint. These scans are now an accepted way to uniquely identify each baby not only while in the hospital, but also to precisely identify a young child in situations like an abduction, lost baby or a natural disaster.
The system is easy to install and use, saving a nurse precious time or need to deal with what can be a messy ink and paper method. Today, 65 percent of hospitals in the U.S. use ink or inkless paper to capture footprints.
The CertaScan Infant Safety System has drawn the attention of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), who has included the technology as a recommendation for hospitals in its most recent Infant Security Guidelines. Just like finger prints, footprints can be used for forensic identification throughout the child’s life. The digital footprints are stored in the baby’s electronic medical record and loaded into a fully secure database that can only be accessed by the hospital that scanned and secured the footprint, and by the mother. Each mom is also provided with a commemorative certificate of her newborn’s footprint before leaving the hospital, and they can create keepsakes from a downloadable digital file.
Stamford Hospital maternity and pediatric units offer the only 24/7, high-risk obstetrics coverage and a designated Level IIIB Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Fairfield County. Multidisciplinary teams provide comprehensive education programs, from childbirth preparation to infant care for mothers of uncomplicated or high-risk pregnancies.