Nascend

Equipping NICU practitioners with a system for patient assessment and recommended treatment plans to assist with weaning newborns off of in-utero exposed drugs.

The Story

Nascend empowers NICU practitioners with an advanced tool to care for infants impacted by opioid exposure. The current product harnesses an algorithm developed by a neonatologist that assesses patient history and symptoms to deliver personalized treatment recommendations. Initially, when Nascend approached Slingshot, the product faced challenges—limited functionality, lack of scalability, manual updates, and inadequate user management.

Slingshot was chosen for its deep expertise in pediatric healthcare and robust custom software capabilities, which have since transformed the solution into a scalable, efficient platform that better supports the critical needs of neonatal care.

Technology: .NET Core, React, DigitalOcean

UX/UI Design

Web Development

The Challenges	The Solutions
The original version wasn’t fully web-based, requiring manual iPad updates at hospitals.	Rebuilt the platform as a web app with automatic updates.
No user management meant practitioners had to re-enter patient data every session.	Added hospital ID-based login to retain patients and persist data across sessions.
The hospital Wi-Fi was unstable, especially in rural areas.	Created an offline mode for data entry that syncs automatically once reconnected.
The UX was clunky and not tailored to the operational workflow.	Redesigned for easier use and added a dark mode for use in low-light NICU spaces.
HIPAA compliance required that patient identities be anonymized.	Built a system for encrypted patient IDs that enabled tracking while maintaining privacy.
Patient handoffs during nurse shift changes weren’t accounted for.	Created a secure patient transfer flow for practitioner handoff during shift changes.

The Challenges	The Solutions
The original version wasn’t fully web-based, requiring manual iPad updates at hospitals.	Rebuilt the platform as a web app with automatic updates.
No user management meant practitioners had to re-enter patient data every session.	Added hospital ID-based login to retain patients and persist data across sessions.
The hospital Wi-Fi was unstable, especially in rural areas.	Created an offline mode for data entry that syncs automatically once reconnected.
The UX was clunky and not tailored to the operational workflow.	Redesigned for easier use and added a dark mode for use in low-light NICU spaces.
HIPAA compliance required that patient identities be anonymized.	Built a system for encrypted patient IDs that enabled tracking while maintaining privacy.
Patient handoffs during nurse shift changes weren’t accounted for.	Created a secure patient transfer flow for practitioner handoff during shift changes.

Hitting The Target

The application is currently being tested on real patients, with the goal of rolling out the new platform across Nascend’s partner hospitals. Once live, this platform will aim to reduce additional drug exposure for infants undergoing withdrawal by promoting proven, non-pharmaceutical interventions.

We’re planning integrations with major EHR systems like Epic down the road. If successful, this platform could become a national standard for neonatal opioid withdrawal care.