UT Medical Center offers patients ‘CarePages’

In the hopes of increasing the emotional support of its patients, the UT Medical Center Web site purchased a license to use a site called CarePages.com on Jan. 30.

Similar to social networking sites, CarePages, Inc. allows patients or their caregivers to create a personal profile complete with background information about the patient, photos and updates about the patient's condition.

"It's very user friendly," said Patrick Giammarco, healthcare marketing manager on the Health Science Campus. "Anyone who can set up an e-mail address can use this site."

The Web site allows for family and friends to stay informed about the patient's condition and offer support through online messages, said Sharon Langshur, co-founder of the site.

"The CarePage allows them to reach out and leave a message of support without feeling as if, ‘I'm going to bother this person, or tire them out, or annoy them by trying to reach them by the phone or coming to visit them in the hospital room,'" Langshur said.

The main purpose of the site is to help patients keep in contact with their friends and family while they're at the Medical Center, Giammarco said. Patients can keep a journal or blog on their personalized site to update their health status, which their family and friends can then respond to. UTMC patients will have contact with their friends and family who might otherwise be too far away to see them personally, Giammarco said.

"People really want to know what is going on with someone who is hospitalized, typically someone who is dealing with an illness over a longer period of time," Langshur said.

The average CarePages community has around 75 members, and because the site automatically sends e-mails to members when a profile is updated, Langshur said some CarePages communities have grown into the thousands, linking a patient to family and friends around the world.

Langshur said the communities formed through the site are essential to the patient's ability to overcome his or her condition.

"There have now been data to show that patients who have a larger social network around them of people that are more tightly connected to them do better in the long term," she said. "They need less pain medication afterwards, they're discharged earlier, so now there's actually qualitative data proving what we knew, what our guts told us early on."

CarePages was founded in 2000 by Langshur and her husband when their eldest child Matthew was born with a congenital heart defect. By the time he was 18 months old, Matthew had undergone three open heart surgeries.

"At the time, we were just completely overwhelmed with taking care of a newborn with complex medical problems, and my brother ... offered to create a Web page for him, which ultimately became the first CarePage," Langshur said. 

When the Web site for her son was established, thousands of people from around the world were able to get in contact with them and offer support. Langshur said the site made it possible for her family to keep in touch with distant relatives in England and Australia. 

"Everybody wanted to just let us know that they were thinking about us, but would not have picked up the phone to call us while we were in the hospital," she said.

Due to physician/patient confidentiality laws, patients' doctors are not involved in their CarePages, Giammarco said. While the Web site itself is free of charge for patients, UTMC licensed the site for $6,600 for a one-year term, he said.

Langshur said she and her husband wanted to make sure that any patient or caregiver who needed this type of tool would have it available for free at any time.

"By licensing it to hospitals, they in turn provide it for free to their patient group," she said. "What hospitals, therefore, are able to say to their patients and caregivers who come through their doors [is], ‘We value this; this is a way that we can demonstrate that emotional support for patients is important, and we recognize that it's important.'"

Since the Web site was first established, Langshur has received enormous feedback from its users. Since 2007, CarePages has received about 30,000 e-mails from patients and caregivers, she said.

"It was just incredible to us because people would reach out to us to say, ‘Thank you, and let me share your story,'" she said.


— Joe Griffith and Jacob East contributed to this report.