Inner Child
A partnership formed under extreme pressure
Neolook has been announced as a finalist in the UK Health Inovation Awards thanks to a collaboration that began under extraordinary circumstances.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and Neolook joined forces to solve a challenge that cut straight to the heart of neonatal care: how to keep parents connected to their babies when physical presence was suddenly restricted. What followed was not only a rapid innovation cycle but an example of how digital care can be designed, validated and safely embedded through true co-creation.
Co-developing a UK-fit neonatal workflow
Alder Hey was the first NHS Trust to implement Neolook’s S2S Family solution. This meant translating the platform into the realities of a UK neonatal unit, where clinical workflows, information governance standards and family-centred care practices differ from those in continental Europe. Working with the hospital’s Innovation Centre, Digital Department and neonatal clinical team, we co-developed a value proposition, refined the workflow, and executed a structured try-out at the height of a global crisis. Every aspect—from human factors to clinical safety—needed to be right. And in Liverpool, a city with a diverse and often more vulnerable population, this required extra attention for social determinants of health, parental wellbeing, and early signals of postnatal depression or psychosis.
Delivering 24/7 family access and creating reusable innovation
Together, we built a system that gave families 24/7 virtual access to their baby, supported controlled conversations between parents and nurses, and enabled independent “visits” without additional burden on staff. Through this journey, we also developed our benefit-tracking module: a structured way to capture parental wellbeing, surface emerging concerns, and give clinicians the context they need to support families holistically. This innovation, born at Alder Hey, has since been adopted by Máxima Medical Center and UMC Utrecht—showing how local frontline ingenuity can become reusable value for an entire international network of hospitals.
Recognition for a model of scalable, co-created neonatal innovation
Becoming a finalist is therefore more than recognition of a product. It is recognition of a partnership built under pressure, a shared commitment to family-centred neonatal care, and a model for how innovations can be created locally, validated clinically, and scaled responsibly across borders. And it is a reminder that when hospitals and innovators work side by side, even the most difficult moments can lead to lasting improvements in care.
"Alder Hey's benefit tracking became standard in our platform. It's used for automated Bonding Scores and NPS Scores. There worries on postnatal depression and psychosis events became part and parcel of our succesfull MDR CE submission."
