Smiles Across the Miles
New parents who just can’t wait to show off their bundles of joy can now take digital photographs and instantly send them via the Internet to far-flung friends and relatives from their hospital bedside.
The innovation being offered at Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center is the brainchild of Denver-based start-up WebFamilies.com.
The online service’s QuikWeb family album computer system allows parents to take multiple photos with a digital camera and write a birth announcement using a laptop computer. The text and photos are then posted on a secured Web site where friends and relatives using a private password can share the newborn’s first hours of life.
Since the service’s launch in October, about 40 hospitals nationwide now offer it and another 100 have signed commitments to do so. Company officials say they intend to sign 1,000 hospitals by 2002.
Two of the country’s largest for-profit hospital chains--Tenet Health Systems (which owns Encino-Tarzana) and HCA--offer the service to their maternity patients.
Other Internet companies, such as MyFamily.com and Homestead.com., offer similar cyber photo albums but do not offer the in-hospital Web site construction component, officials said.
Encino-Tarzana is the only hospital in the San Fernando Valley to offer the QuikWeb service, said Ron Yukelson, a hospital spokesman.
The company plans to make money by providing an opportunity for parents and other visitors to buy reprints, flowers or baby gifts online, officials said. Parents also can elect to receive direct solicitations from companies marketing to new parents.
“This is the solution hospitals have been searching for and the service new parents want,” said Rick Tallman, president and chief executive of WebFamily Ventures, which was founded by two entrepreneurs and an emergency-room physician.
“Hospitals can finally deliver a beautiful, secure family Web site branded with their identity.”
Besides being free to the hospital and new parents, the QuikWeb system is unobtrusive, company officials said.
A WebFamilies technician installs and maintains all the necessary equipment, freeing a hospital’s nursing and information technology staffs from taking newborns’ photos and uploading them online.
A patient needs only to roll a cart containing the laptop and camera into her hospital room and follow step-by-step instructions on how to photograph the new baby, record vital statistics and enter personalized messages. The photos and text are automatically uploaded to the family’s newly created, private Web site via a wireless modem.
Paul Rock and Stacey Perkins Rock, both 32, of Newhall, happily snapped photographs of their son, Nathan, one day after his arrival at the Women’s Pavilion at Encino-Tarzana.
“We are very excited about this because our families are in Missouri and Minnesota,” said Nathan’s mother. “It is wonderful that they will be able to see him so quickly. They keep asking, ‘When can we log on?’ ”
WebFamilies’ challenge will be to encourage parents to keep updating their personal Web page once the initial euphoria surrounding the birth wears off.
Stacey Perkins Rock said she plans to maintain the Web site as Nathan and older sister, Emily, 4, grow up.
“We are not very Internet-savvy, but to have the Web site already set up makes it easier,” she said. “And I’m sure the grandparents will encourage us to keep adding pictures.”
