Internet Allows Virtual Hospital Visits

When Jessie McCarthy was in the hospital for major surgery, she was in no condition to call her friends and family--in Curacao, the Netherlands and New York--to keep them updated on her condition.

She left that to her Guardian Angel.

Using a new computer program at White Plains Hospital Center, McCarthy’s husband, Tim, set up a private Internet page and entered the e-mail addresses of their loved ones. The program gave a password to those pre-approved visitors and notified them every time Tim McCarthy--the page’s designated “Guardian Angel”--posted an update.

Without leaving the hospital or accessing his own e-mail account, McCarthy could walk down the hall to a visitingOurs.com kiosk--there are five at the hospital--and type in whatever he wanted people to know.

“Everything went fine,” McCarthy wrote on the day of surgery in July. “Jessie is in recovery for the next 2 hours and then she will be moved to the CCU unit.”

Two days later, he wrote, “After a challenging night, she is feeling much better now. . . . Jessie sends thanks for all your prayers and good thoughts.”

The friends and relatives could visit the page anytime to get the latest news, leave their own good wishes and even order a get-well gift from Amazon.com, Toys ‘R’ Us or 1-800-Flowers.

“Hi I’m happy to hear that everything is going good,” read one message left by a nephew in the Netherlands. “Greetings to Tante [Dutch for aunt] Jessie and tell her I send a big “Knuffel” [“hug”] and to get well soon.”

Another message made available by the McCarthys was written by a friend in a language spoken in Curacao and Aruba: “I am writing in Papiamento so you can know that Curacao also is thinking about you,” the friend said. “I will check later how the surgery went.”

As she recovered, Jessie McCarthy, a teacher, wrote her own messages from the hospital or from her home in Hartsdale. There’s no limit on how long a page can be used.

The program is also in use, or about to come online, at the Ronald McDonald House in Manhattan, CancerCare, the New York State Hospice Assn. and Action for Sick Children in London. About 100 patients were using it during a recent week. A similar service, called theStatus, is in use at the Cleveland Clinic Heart Center and has about 250 patient pages, said company spokeswoman Missy Corbat.

The developer, president and chief executive officer of visitingOurs is David Gottesfeld, a White Plains psychologist.

“The beauty of what our site does is once you create that e-mail list, you don’t have to worry about it anymore,” he said. “All you have to do is post the updates, and we take care of the rest.”

Though he lets not-for-profit organizations affiliate for free, Gottesfeld said he expects the business to be making money from licensing and retail links by the end of the year.

“We become financially more valuable the more pages that are opened up, the more people that are using it,” he said. “Part of this is also just doing good, helping people.”

He said visitingOurs is complementary, rather than competitive, to other hospital-oriented sites like babypressconference.com, which lets new parents tell friends about a newborn and even do a live Internet video chat.

Vivian Harris, president of Ronald McDonald House, said the program is ideal for her institution, which puts up 84 children and one parent each while the kids are being treated for cancer.

“These kids are away from home, lots of relatives can’t visit and they all love computers,” she said.

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On the Net:

https://www.visitingOurs.com

https://www.theStatus.com

https://www.babypressconference.com

White Plains Hospital Center:

https://www.wphospital.org