Keywords: Right-sized care • Workforce efficiency • Interoperability • Asynchronous telehealth • Sustainability • Health equity • Consumer-facing technology • Chronic condition management • Dashboard • Low Bandwidth • Trusted health information • HIPAA Compliance

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Overview/Need

Across the United States, rural and frontier families often travel long distances—sometimes two to four hours—for same-day pediatric care. More than 60% of U.S. counties are designated Health Professional Shortage Areas, and many lack a practicing pediatrician. Young children experience six to eight respiratory or febrile illnesses each year—mostly viral—but a majority of parents seek care within 24 hours of symptom onset. This leads to avoidable emergency-department visits, unnecessary antibiotics, and preventable healthcare costs. Asthma—the most common chronic condition of childhood—affects more than six million U.S. children and is a leading cause of emergency visits and missed school days. Rural and tribal communities face even greater challenges: limited access to pediatric subspecialists, delayed follow-up, and fewer care coordination resources increase the risk of uncontrolled asthma and repeat hospitalizations. Even as broadband expands, many clinics continue to face connectivity, staffing, and reimbursement barriers that limit live telehealth options. Families in rural, tribal, and frontier regions need right-sized, sustainable, and broadband-flexible telehealth solutions that support both timely acute assessment and ongoing chronic-condition management while preserving local continuity of care.

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Solution Summary

Designed to bridge the pediatric care gap in rural and tribal communities, MamaBear Health is a HIPAA-compliant, EHR-integrated mobile health platform that enables early, data-informed triage of respiratory illness and chronic conditions such as asthma. The consumer-facing app allows parents to capture symptom data and short videos of their child’s breathing for asynchronous clinician review. Providers receive structured triage reports via secure weblink or encrypted email, supporting a store-and-forward telehealth model that is scalable, interoperable, and sustainable across rural and frontier networks. MamaBear Health links families, rural nurses, primary care providers, and pediatric subspecialists through a right-sized escalation pathway that ensures care occurs at the most appropriate level. Nurse reviewers conduct the initial triage; primary care providers review and manage cases locally; and pediatric subspecialists intervene only when higher-level expertise is required. This structure reduces unnecessary referrals and emergency transfers, preserves local clinic capacity, and ensures timely in-person evaluation for children who need it—while also improving asthma follow-up and chronic care coordination through consistent documentation and feedback loops. The platform operates even in low-connectivity environments, with offline data capture and automatic upload once connected. Clinicians and subspecialists review parent-submitted recordings asynchronously to make timely triage and referral decisions—relieving subspecialty bottlenecks, reducing workforce strain, and expanding equitable access to high-quality pediatric care statewide. Beyond the mobile app, MamaBear Health provides managed IT and compliance services that include secure cloud servers, HIPAA compliance audits, encryption, and continuous monitoring. These services ensure audit readiness and alignment with state and federal IT modernization goals, allowing rural clinics to participate without new IT infrastructure or staffing.

Complementing the clinical workflow, MamaBear hosts clinician-reviewed parent education channels—including in-app content, a YouTube library, and a moderated Reddit community—to provide trusted, evidence-based guidance that reduces reliance on online misinformation and reinforces consistent public health messaging statewide.

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Implementation Readiness

MamaBear Health is fully developed for rural clinical workflows, and supported by clinician SOPs and subspecialist-led training modules. Deployment can begin within 30 days of award and requires only minimal on-site IT setup. The platform integrates seamlessly with Epic/MyChart or operates via secure email for clinics not yet equipped for EHR integration, enabling right-sized triage across nurses, primary care providers, and pediatric subspecialists. It also supports offline data capture with automatic upload in low-bandwidth areas, ensuring reliable performance even in remote or frontier settings.

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Alignment with RHTP Goals

(C) Consumer Technology Solutions
Deploys a HIPAA-compliant, consumer-facing mobile app enabling parents to record structured symptom data and short videos for asynchronous clinical review, while accessing clinician-reviewed educational content that strengthens health literacy and self-triage confidence. The platform represents a care-model innovation, blending home data capture, clinician decision support, and trusted public communication through MamaBear’s YouTube education library and moderated Reddit community, which help reduce reliance on online misinformation. Its subscription-based structure and minimal clinic onboarding needs support long-term financial and operational sustainability beyond the initial RHTP funding period. The platform also supports continuous monitoring and follow-up for chronic respiratory conditions, including asthma, aligning with RHTP’s goals to improve chronic disease management and reduce preventable hospitalizations in rural and tribal communities.

(D) Training and Technical Assistance
Provides standardized onboarding, workflow setup, and South Dakota–specific SOPs for clinicians and administrators, paired with public-facing education materials that reinforce consistent clinical messaging statewide. Subspecialist-led training supports right-sized triage across nurses, primary care providers, and pediatric subspecialists, ensuring uniform escalation and referral practices across rural and frontier networks. These training modules build local capacity and reduce dependence on external consultants, creating a self-sustaining clinical workforce model.

(F) Information Technology Modernization
Creates a secure, HIPAA-compliant data-exchange infrastructure using encrypted weblinks that integrate with existing EMRs (Epic/MyChart) or secure email, unifying telehealth, clinical data, and communication workflows. The platform also provides managed IT and compliance services—including secure cloud servers, HIPAA audits, and continuous monitoring—and supports offline data capture with automatic upload, ensuring resilience and interoperability in low-bandwidth environments. This architecture enables population-level reporting for conditions like asthma, reduces manual data entry, and supports RHTP’s goal of statewide data modernization.

Sustainability and Scalability

Operational Sustainability – MamaBear Health is fully developed, field-tested in rural workflows, and supported by established clinician SOPs and subspecialist-led training modules. Standardized onboarding and integrated clinician dashboards allow new sites to launch quickly and maintain consistent performance with minimal IT support. Financial Sustainability – Our subscription-based model is designed to ensure that rural clinics and health systems do not incur a loss by participating. Low setup costs, reimbursement alignment with store-and-forward telehealth codes, and measurable reductions in unnecessary ER transfers make the platform self-sustaining beyond initial implementation. Technical Sustainability – MamaBear operates on secure, cloud-based servers managed by Loon Medical. The system includes HIPAA compliance audits, encrypted data exchange, and automatic updates, ensuring that clinics stay compliant without new infrastructure or staff burden. Workforce Sustainability – A right-sized care model routes cases appropriately across nurses, primary care providers, and pediatric subspecialists—reducing burnout, preserving local capacity, and ensuring families get timely care from the right provider. Scalability – Built for interoperability with Epic/MyChart or secure email, MamaBear Health can scale across rural and tribal networks statewide. Offline data capture and automatic upload make it broadband-flexible, ensuring equitable access regardless of connectivity.

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Impact and Measurement

• Right-Sized Care Decisions: Fewer unnecessary emergency transfers and better allocation of local clinic capacity through early, data-informed triage.
• Reduced Antibiotic Overuse: Structured symptom documentation and asynchronous review support evidence-based prescribing and lower antibiotic misuse rates.
• Improved Care Continuity: Families remain connected to their local clinic through integrated communication and referral workflows.
• Expanded Telehealth and Broadband Flexibility: Store-and-forward workflows operate even in low-connectivity settings, strengthening rural and tribal telehealth infrastructure.
• Scalable, Statewide Implementation: Ready for phased deployment across rural networks, directly advancing the goals of the Rural Health Transformation Program.
• Information Source and Dashboard:
  • All data submitted through the app are aggregated in a secure, cloud-based analytics dashboard that provides de-identified, real-time metrics for state and clinic administrators. The dashboard supports quality-improvement reporting, including:
  • Case volumes by site and symptom type
  • Referral outcomes and time-to-review
  • Antibiotic utilization trends
  • Connectivity and usage rates across broadband tiers

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Aligned—and Built for Action

National coalitions, such as the Collaborative for Healthy Rural America (CHRA) and CMS’s Rural Health Transformation Program, share a common goal: developing interoperable, sustainable models for rural healthcare. MamaBear Health delivers the last mile—providing a field-tested, HIPAA-compliant, broadband-flexible platform that can deploy statewide within 30 days. By connecting families, nurses, primary care providers, and subspecialists through asynchronous triage workflows, MamaBear converts national priorities into practical, measurable results.

Interested state or health-system partners can request the full implementation plan and budget. Contact [mamabear@loonmd.com] | 📞 (612) 868-0073 or web Contact Form

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MamaBear Health is developed by Loon Medical, LLC — a USDA SBIR awardee and HIPAA-compliant telehealth innovator. * Phase I award — “Smartphone Application for collection of clinical-quality respiratory signs and symptoms.” Grant USDA NIFA, Award Year 2022, No: 2022-33530-37069. * Phase II award: “Bridging The Gap: A HIPAA-Compliant, EHR-Integrated Mobile Health App To Enhance Pediatric Respiratory Care Access In Rural and Tribal Areas,” USDA NIFA, Award Year 2024, No. 2024-04749. *Recipient of Minnesota DEED / Launch Minnesota Innovation Grants, 2022, 2024