The Problem
The Interstage Mortality Crisis
​​The story we shared is not unique. It happens thousands of times every year.
​
Over 40,000 infants are born with congenital heart disease annually in the United States. Many of the most severe cases involve single-ventricle defects, requiring multiple staged surgeries. Between those surgeries, infants are sent home.
​
This period, known as the interstage, is one of the deadliest phases in pediatric cardiac care.
An Impossible Burden
​
Parents who are not cardiac clinicians are suddenly expected to provide ICU-level care at home:
-
Managing complex feeding protocols
-
Administering multiple medications on strict schedules
-
Recognizing subtle warning signs of deterioration
-
Monitoring weight, fluids, and energy levels
-
Making life-critical decisions without medical training​
​
Families are typically sent home with basic pulse oximeters and minimal support. There is no way to verify care quality, no early warning system when a child begins to decline, and no safety net when mistakes happen.
​
The Reality
15–20% of these fragile infants die during the interstage period.
That represents up to 8,000 preventable deaths every year in the U.S.
These children do not die from their heart defects alone. They die from:
-
Undetected feeding complications
-
Missed or incorrect medications
-
Gradual deterioration that goes unnoticed
-
Dehydration or exhaustion that isn’t caught in time
By the time symptoms are obvious to an untrained caregiver, intervention is often too late.
​
Why Current Solutions Fall Short
​
Traditional home monitors track only basic vital signs. They cannot:
​
-
Detect subtle changes in circulation or skin color
-
Assess feeding quality or effectiveness
-
Verify medication administration
-
Interpret movement patterns or fatigue
-
Distinguish normal variation from dangerous trends
​
Worse, frequent false alarms create alarm fatigue, conditioning families to ignore alerts. When a real emergency occurs, it may be dismissed as another false positive.
​
The Fundamental Gap
​
The problem isn’t that families don’t care, and it isn’t that clinicians don’t provide education.
The problem is that we ask exhausted, frightened parents to replicate ICU-level care at home, without the tools, visibility, or support systems that make that level of care possible.
​
Hospital-grade awareness should not disappear when a child leaves the ICU, continuity of care requires continuity of awareness.
​​
That is the gap KibbyMedical™ was built to bridge.​
​