Breastfeeding offers major benefits for parents and babies, but conventional perinatal care doesn’t provide evidence-based information and services for navigating its many challenges. Inspired by her own nursing struggles, Dr. Linda Dahl devoted over two decades of her career to developing a system for defining and addressing infant feeding and breastfeeding problems, which she has applied with patients in her clinical practice with a more than 90% success rate.

Determined to share her hard-won knowledge beyond the scope of her busy office, Dr. Dahl authored Better Breastfeeding: a Doctor’s Guide to Nursing without Pain and Frustration and Clinician’s Guide to Breastfeeding. But she knew she could offer even better and broader support through a multimedia, interactive format, so she asked us to build an online platform to make it happen.

To maximize reach and impact, Dr. Dahl’s team envisioned a virtual coach that would provide personalized, responsive resource recommendations to parents in need - right when it’s needed, at any time of the day (or night). We partnered with her team to create a platform that empowers users to easily find the answers they need, with the backend sophistication to distill multiple information streams into personalized advice centering relevant video content.

We helped Dr. Dahl adapt her in-person protocol for a digital format, creating an ecosystem of responsive questionnaires, a progress tracking system, and dynamic content recommendations to provide relevant guidance across the breastfeeding journey. The resulting Virtual Breastfeeding Specialist leads the user through an initial self-assessment centered on their goals and concerns, then uses a custom-built algorithm to recommend instructional resources based on their challenges. Users can re-take the assessment at any time, enabling the program to adjust its recommendations over time.

Dr. Dahl and her team drew upon her in-person clinical strategies to create a comprehensive series of original video tutorials, each focused on a specific breastfeeding topic. We worked with them to analyze and categorize this new video library, and then developed a complementary recommendation engine to suggest the most relevant content based on user responses to guided questionnaires, milk production metrics, and more.

Wellness Check-Ins combine responsive forms with a custom-programmed knowledge engine to gather and analyze important nursing metrics, which the algorithm uses to generate trend summaries and benchmark comparisons. These checklists can be referenced or shared with the family’s own care providers to ensure nutrition goals are being achieved.