Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is redefining what pediatric care looks like in the digital age. Rather than treating telehealth as an add-on service, CHOP has built a fully integrated, enterprisewide digital care model designed to follow patients across every stage of their care journey — from the hospital floor to the family home.
Jess Boyle, Senior Director of Digital Care Transformation and Digital Health at CHOP, has been at the center of this transformation. According to Boyle, the strategy is not simply an extension of ambulatory telehealth. It is a comprehensive ecosystem built to support patients regardless of where they are on any given day.
What Is CHOP’s Digital Care Model?
At its core, CHOP’s digital care model is built on continuity. The goal is to eliminate the traditional gap that exists between a hospital visit and what happens after a patient walks out the door. By leveraging remote monitoring technologies, digital workflows, and data-driven tools, CHOP ensures that clinical support does not end at discharge.
This approach places digital care at the center of the organization’s operational and clinical planning — not at the periphery. It spans post-discharge monitoring, chronic disease management, presurgical programs, and primary care, making it one of the most ambitious pediatric digital health strategies in the country.
The CATCH Program: Monitoring High-Risk Patients at Home
How CATCH Works
One of the flagship initiatives under CHOP’s digital strategy is CATCH — Connected Applications to Transition to Care at Home. This is a post-discharge program specifically designed to monitor high-risk pediatric patients after they leave the hospital.
As Boyle described it, “The idea is to catch these babies before they fall.” The program uses remote monitoring tools to keep clinical teams connected to vulnerable patients, enabling early identification of deteriorating conditions before they escalate into emergencies.
Saving Lives Through Early Intervention
One of the most compelling examples within CATCH focuses on infants diagnosed with single-ventricle heart disease — one of the most serious congenital cardiac conditions. Through continuous remote monitoring, CHOP clinicians have been able to detect early warning signs of critical illness and bring children back for urgent intervention before their condition becomes life-threatening. Boyle noted that the program has contributed to saving an estimated nine to ten lives in this high-risk cardiac population alone.
Expanding Digital Care Beyond Post-Discharge
CHOP’s digital health ambitions extend well beyond the CATCH program. The hospital has rolled out remote monitoring into presurgical preparation programs, allowing clinical teams to assess and support patients ahead of planned procedures. For children managing chronic conditions such as epilepsy on a ketogenic diet, CHOP’s monitoring programs are designed to be long-term — patients may remain enrolled indefinitely, receiving ongoing support and oversight from their care teams.
This expansion demonstrates CHOP’s commitment to treating digital care not as a temporary bridge, but as a permanent and evolving component of pediatric healthcare delivery.
The Newborn Navigator Program
In primary care, CHOP launched its Newborn Navigator program, which focuses on anticipatory guidance for new families. Using historical patient data and predictive analytics, the hospital delivers targeted educational content to families during a child’s first year of life — addressing common questions and concerns before they prompt a phone call or urgent message to clinical staff.
Boyle described this effort as creating “a manual for the first year of life.” By anticipating the challenges new parents typically face, CHOP is able to proactively reach families with the right information at the right time, reducing unnecessary care contacts and improving the overall experience for families.
Addressing the Pediatric Workforce Shortage
One of the most urgent drivers behind CHOP’s digital transformation is the growing shortage of pediatric specialists across the United States. As Boyle put it, “There are not enough people graduating from any pediatric fellowship that you can consider in the country to fill the need of the medical complexity that we’re seeing.”
Digital care offers a meaningful solution to this workforce gap. By enabling clinicians to remotely monitor larger patient panels, CHOP can redirect clinical talent away from routine, low-acuity tasks and toward the patients who need the highest level of in-person attention. This model preserves inpatient and ambulatory capacity for the most critical cases while ensuring that lower-acuity patients continue to receive attentive, proactive care through digital channels.
Measuring Clinical and Operational Outcomes
CHOP measures the impact of its digital programs across both clinical and operational dimensions. On the clinical side, key indicators include avoided hospital readmissions, prevented emergency department visits, and early detection of patient deterioration. The single-ventricle cardiac monitoring program stands as one of the most compelling proof points, with measurable life-saving outcomes documented over the program’s run.
Operationally, CHOP tracks how digital workflows are replacing what Boyle called “analog care models” — the manual phone calls, paper-based follow-ups, and time-intensive check-ins that have historically burdened clinical teams. This shift toward digital efficiency creates gains in labor productivity, cost management, and overall system performance.
Reimbursement, however, remains a complex challenge. Stand-alone children’s hospitals like CHOP do not always fit neatly into adult-designed payment frameworks, making it difficult to capture full financial credit for the value generated by digital care programs. Despite this, Boyle emphasized the importance of maintaining a holistic view: “Where are the cost efficiencies, where are the labor efficiencies, where are the clinical efficiencies in all of this?”
Challenges in Scaling Pediatric Digital Care
One of the most significant barriers CHOP faces in scaling its digital care model is the limited availability of connected devices designed specifically for children. The remote monitoring market has been largely built around adult patients, leaving significant gaps in the availability of child-specific tools, wearables, and sensors.
Bridging this gap requires innovation not just in clinical workflows, but in the broader ecosystem of pediatric health technology — a challenge that CHOP and institutions like it are working to address through partnerships, research, and advocacy.
Conclusion
CHOP’s enterprisewide digital care strategy represents a bold and necessary evolution in pediatric healthcare. By integrating remote monitoring, digital workflows, and data-driven programs like CATCH and the Newborn Navigator across the full continuum of care, CHOP is demonstrating what the future of children’s health can look like. The results — lives saved, readmissions avoided, and clinical capacity preserved — offer a compelling case for digital care as a cornerstone of modern pediatric health systems.
