The Incubator

Send us Fan Mail What do you reach for when you're called to a delivery at 2 a.m. and the NRP algorithm feels just out of reach? In this episode, Ben sits down with Lily Bachelor, a neonatal nurse practitioner from Colorado who turned her own new grad anxiety into a practical bedside tool. Together with her husband, a graphic designer specializing in signage and wayfinding, Lily created badge...

Send us Fan Mail How long should you treat a UTI in an 8-day-old, and when do you really need a VCUG? On this Journal Club, Daphna breaks down the brand-new AAP clinical practice guideline for urinary tract infection in children from 8 days to 5 years, the first update since 2011 and the first to include infants under two months. She walks through the key action statements: a lower culture thresho...

Send us Fan Mail What FiO2 should you start at for a 34-week preterm infant who needs help breathing at birth? On this Journal Club, Ben reviews the AIROPLANE trial, a cluster randomized crossover study across 26 Australian maternity hospitals comparing initial FiO2 of 30% versus 21% in 1,818 infants born at 32 to 35 weeks. Ongoing respiratory support leaving the delivery room was nearly identical...

Send us Fan Mail Recording live at the FANNP National Neonatal Nurse Practitioner Symposium, Daphna and Christa sit down with Dr. Jacqui Hoffman, associate professor in the DNP NNP track at Rush University and the symposium’s speaker coordinator. She shares what keeps the conference fresh, from on-demand sessions to hands-on PICC and ventilator workshops, and why she finds the work fulfilling rath...

Send us Fan Mail Recording live at the FANNP National Neonatal Nurse Practitioner Symposium, Daphna and Christa sit down with Dr. Debbie Shirey, Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Baylor University, to revisit the morning’s opening talk. At 23, Debbie was a journalist and weekend DJ when she delivered her son at 27 weeks and spent four months commuting 130 miles to the NICU. A primary nurse...

Send us Fan Mail When a NICU mother comes back from surgery, do you know what she was told about pumping? Recording live at the FANNP National Neonatal Nurse Practitioner Symposium, Daphna sits down with Dr. Michele Savin, NNP program director at Thomas Jefferson University. She shares how a group of CRNA doctoral students challenged the outdated “pump and dump” advice, showing that most anestheti...

Send us Fan Mail Are you still waiting for a creatinine of 1.5 before calling it acute kidney injury? Recording live from the FANNP National Neonatal Nurse Practitioner Symposium, Daphna sits down with Dr. Terri Marin, NNP and nurse scientist at Augusta University and Children’s Hospital of Georgia, and the first NNP member of the Neonatal Kidney Collaborative. She explains why preterm infants are...

Send us Fan Mail What if the sedative you added to spare opioids is the reason your patient is still on them? Recording live from the 2026 National Neonatal Nurse Practitioner Symposium in Clearwater, Florida, Daphna sits down with Dr. Khorshid Mohammad, neonatal neurocritical care expert from the University of Calgary, to preview his three talks. He shares how one small change in rounding languag...

Send us Fan Mail The Incubator Podcast is coming to you from the sold-out National Neonatal Nurse Practitioner Symposium in sunny Clearwater, Florida! Daphna is joined by her co-host for the week, Dr. Krista Matrone, as they sit down with the speakers, educators, and nurse practitioners shaping the future of neonatal care. From neurodevelopment and pain management to kidney health, breastfeeding,...

Send us Fan Mail What do you do when a feeder-grower has tried every bottle, nipple, and pacing strategy and still can’t finish a feed? On this Journal Club, Daphna brings a palate cleanser after yesterday’s deep dive on probiotics: a retrospective study from Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital testing banana puree as a natural thickener for NICU infants with dysphagia. Among 43 mature preter...

Send us Fan Mail Has the evidence on probiotics finally reached a tipping point? On this Journal Club, Ben, fresh off a night shift, opens with two announcements: a follow-up on the ABP’s fellowship length decision and a new partnership with Pediatrix that may finally bring CME to the platform. Daphna highlights the Neonatal Insights conference in Houston. Ben then reviews a Swedish national cohor...

Send us Fan Mail The American Board of Pediatrics has reversed course. After months of pushback from the neonatology community, the ABP has excluded neonatal-perinatal medicine from the two year fellowship waivers it is now granting to seven other pediatric subspecialties. Neonatology fellowship stays at three years. Ben is joined by Dr. Patrick Myers, past chair of ONTPD and fellowship director a...

Send us Fan Mail This week on The Incubator Podcast, Ben and Daphna dig into four studies testing what the evidence supports at the bedside. They open with the 24-month BeNeDuctus follow-up, where expectant management and early ibuprofen for PDA yield identical survival without neurodevelopmental impairment. Daphna then presents the Nourish trial, finding individually targeted milk fortification d...

Send us Fan Mail Does Tylenol in pregnancy cause autism or ADHD? In this edition of Neo News, Ben and Eli break down a major JAMA Internal Medicine study from Hong Kong that followed hundreds of thousands of mother-child pairs and used a sibling-matched design to answer the question. The verdict: no association between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and autism spectrum disorder or ADHD, regardles...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Daphna reviews the first national estimate of potential neonatal organ donors, a Pediatrics cohort study from 23 Australian NICUs, along with its companion commentary. Of 1,760 infants who died in the NICU between 2012 and 2022 at 35 weeks corrected age or later, about one in three met conservative eligibility criteria. Most would have donated after c...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben reviews a JAMA Network Open study from two Dutch Level IV NICUs. It examined NEC before and after routine implementation of a three-strain probiotic in 1,413 infants born before 30 weeks or under 1,000 grams. NEC fell from 11.9% to 5.3%, and late-onset sepsis also declined. But non-NEC mortality rose after implementation. NEC also dropped in an un...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Daphna presents a JAMA Pediatrics randomized trial led by Mandy Belfort and Terrie Inder. It tested whether point-of-care human milk analysis, used to individually target protein and fat fortification, improves outcomes in infants born at 24 to 30 weeks. Milk was analyzed every weekday with the Miris analyzer. Fortification in the intervention group w...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben and Daphna review the 24-month follow-up of the BeNeDuctus trial, which compared expectant management with early ibuprofen for PDA in infants born before 28 weeks. Survival without neurodevelopmental impairment was identical in both groups, at 49%. Ben places the findings alongside Baby-OSCAR, the PDA trial, TRIOCAPI, and SMART-PDA, and explains w...

Send us Fan Mail Feeding in the NICU is rarely one person's job, yet the language around it changes from nurse to therapist to physician to parent. In this Tech Tuesday episode, Ben and Daphna sit down with Lisa Kleinz and Erin Lesage of Dr. Brown's Medical to unpack feeding together, a philosophy built on team approach, family at the center, and feeding that begins on day one rather tha...

Send us Fan Mail Ben sits down with Dr. Shetal Shah and AAP federal advocacy director Stephanie Glier to unpack HR1, the sweeping reconciliation bill that could cut $1.15 trillion in federal Medicaid spending over the next decade. With 40% of US births and up to 65% of NICU graduates covered by Medicaid, the stakes for neonatology are enormous. Shetal and Stephanie break down state directed paymen...

Send us Fan Mail This week on The Incubator Podcast, Ben and Daphna dig into four studies reshaping bedside decisions. They open questioning whether routine DAT screening for ABO and RhD incompatibility still earns its place, finding transcutaneous bilirubin alone predicts phototherapy need just as well. Next, a Swedish national registry of over two million births links missed intramuscular vitami...

Send us Fan Mail Ben and Eli dig into a Journal of Perinatology study that asks a deceptively simple question: can we trust birth certificate data to tell us how many babies actually need NICU care? The answer, it turns out, is no. Nearly 40% of NICU admissions are missing from birth certificates, with the biggest gaps among full-term and late-preterm infants, and troubling racial disparities in w...

Send us Fan Mail Ben and Daphna  dig into a large, population-based study linking IVF conception to VACTERL association, a rare but serious pattern of congenital anomalies spanning the vertebral, anal, cardiac, tracheoesophageal, renal, and limb systems. Drawing on over 1.5 million births across four US states and linked SART registry data, the study finds IVF-conceived infants face significantly...

Send us Fan Mail Ben and Daphna dig into a pilot RCT that asks a deceptively simple delivery-room question: should very preterm infants start on CPAP of 5 or CPAP of 8 cmH2O? The PHILODENDRON trial, out of Milan's Buzzi Children's Hospital, randomized 56 babies born between 26 and 29 weeks to find out — testing feasibility, safety, and early physiological adaptation before committing to...

Send us Fan Mail Is the newborn vitamin K shot really being skipped more often these days, and does that actually matter clinically? This week on Journal Club, Ben and Daphna review a nationwide Swedish cohort study of over two million births, published in JAMA Pediatrics, examining trends in non-receipt of intramuscular vitamin K and its link to bleeding in infancy. Non-receipt nearly doubled bet...