Infant Warming

Dr. Leah Greenspan Hodor has a drive to make a difference and innovate. When Dr. Leah first began working with Warmilu, the team identified the potential to improve the infant warming blanket to make it easier to use and re-use for healthcare teams. Initially, Warmilu had a washable blanket with a knit interior, which could be difficult to re-use in resource-scarce hospitals. She provided first-hand fieldwork feedback and data collection of blankets warming 2 babies every few hours. This feedback enabled the Warmilu team in a single month to create wipable blanket surfaces. This allowed Dr. Leah’s team, by using the Warmilu IncuBlankets, to use the new wipable surface White Transport Incubator Blankets to warm 2-15 infants per hour.

“Anytime you save a baby it’s a beautiful thing,” she says. Dr. Leah has traveled to Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana and Haiti, where she has trained scores of doctors, nurses and midwives in techniques to save newborn babies in peril. “A large percentage of neonatal mortality is preventable if you have the proper training,” she says, adding, “And when you save one baby, you’re not only saving that baby’s life but potential generations.”

When she’s not traveling abroad or developing medical and educational initiatives, Greenspan Hodor works 16-hour shifts in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at two community hospitals in the Washington, D.C. area. “I am gone 10 weeks a year developing the project,” she says, often traveling to Africa five times a year.