Missouri’s Ranken Jordan simulated home helps families transition out of hospital care

You may have heard of hospital at home, but have you heard of bringing the home into the hospital?

Simulated home, or sim home, programs are designed to help patients and their caregivers transition from the hospital environment to their own living quarters.

Conducting training with loved ones is common practice before sending a child home from the hospital, especially in complex cases where there are medical devices and strict regimes involved. Sim home extends that idea beyond just education, giving patients an environment where they can adapt to a non-hospital living situation.

Sim home is not a brand-new concept, but it’s still relatively rare. It’s unclear exactly how many such programs exist across the US, though in 2023 Becker’s recognized 34 hospitals with strong educational and simulation programs for children and adults across the US.

Chief Nursing Officer Kristin LaRose played a big role in opening the 60-bed Maryland Heights-based Ranken Jordan Pediatric Bridge Hospital’s sim home environment, the first of its kind in Missouri. After launching last June, the program has already served five or six families, she told us.

“Anything that we can do to support our families to help them feel good about taking their child home and confident, that’s what we want to do,” LaRose said.

Home at hospital. Ranken Jordan treats children with medically complex conditions, with over 500 inpatient and outpatient stays in 2025. Patients sometimes have multiple diagnoses and may require medical equipment, LaRose said. This means the children need personalized care, machinery, and close attention from family and staff. As a result, many of the patients have never been outside the hospital.

In 2022, nearly 1 million hospitalizations were dedicated to medically complex children, according to 2025 research published in the journal Pediatrics. According to a separate 2020 study, while only 6% of the pediatric patient population have medical complexities, their care makes up roughly 40% of spending for all pediatrics.

LaRose added that families lack privacy to do things like read bedtime stories or adapt to environments without other children, alarms, lights, and hospital staff also present.

Sim home environments are modeled after—you guessed it—traditional home environments. The one at Ranken Jordan, for example, has a private living room and bedroom area with a crib, food, television, and toys.

Ranken Jordan staff got the idea for their sim home from Bethany Children’s Health Center in Oklahoma, which opened its program in August 2023. This hospital has a “smart home” with a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, according to the program’s site. It also familiarizes caregivers with medical tools, like ventilators and medications, to prepare them for the transition to caring for their child at home.

One of the most common activities patients in Bethany Children’s smart home program enjoy is gaming, as it provides “opportunities for creativity, connection, and joy in a home-like setting,” the hospital’s adaptive recreation and fine arts complex manager, Catherine Kwitowski, said in a statement.

LaRose said her staff walked away from Bethany Children’s inspired to build something similar for their patients.

How it works. Before taking patients home, caregivers must complete training and prove competency to the medical staff, LaRose said. For example, if a patient needs a ventilator, they are trained on how it works. Then, once they are ready, they generally take the night shift and care for their child in the sim home.

This usually happens about a week before discharge while staff is still present and monitoring the patient, so if something does go wrong, clinicians aren’t far away.

“Families really feel like it just gave them that extra confidence that they needed to be able to go home with their child,” LaRose said.