The North Adelaide Local Health Network has digitized its prenatal care delivery to reduce the administrative burden on its midwives while enabling personalized support for pregnant women.
The NALHN Online Pregnancy Platform (POPN) was developed in partnership with Personify Care, which has empowered the system with digital pathways that provide information specific to a woman’s stage of pregnancy. The technology also automatically captures and checks clinical data points from consumers.
WHY IT MATTERS
According to a media release, POPN is able to rapidly identify patients who need additional tests or support before their first appointment with a midwife. It replaces the network’s previous paper-based process, which relied on making phone calls to assess risks for mothers-to-be at their first consultation.
Since digitizing their workflows, clinical staff have seen increased attendance numbers, reduced appointment waiting lists and improved midwifery care.
Julia Dalton, NALHN POPN Project Midwife Lead, claims that “91% of users who have previously given birth with NALHN find POPN to be the same, if not much easier than their previous triage experience”.
In the future, NALHN plans to expand the system featuring Personify Care’s digital pathways to support women for the rest of their pregnancy journey. They also aim to digitize workflows in other elective surgery specialties.
THE BIGGEST TREND
Personify Care has recently supported several digital transformation initiatives across hospitals and health facilities in Australia by implementing its digital pathways. One of them, Central Adelaide Local Health Network, was able to start a pre-surgical rehabilitation program, which helps patients become fit for surgery. The health IT firm also deployed its technology to digitize its Direct Access Colonoscopy program. Queen Elizabeth Hospitalalso part of CALHN.
Personify Care has also empowered its home care program St John of God Hospital Murdoch in Perth. The program has since expanded from general surgery to special surgery wards.
ON THE RECORD
For this digital transformation project, NALHN midwives and obstetricians were assigned as digital leads to ensure clinical teams were in control of their workflows and protocols from the start.
“By working collaboratively with Personify Care to support ‘digital directions’ within each clinical team and decentralizing the digital transformation of patient pathways, we have ensured that the solution meets the needs of our staff and customers and fits within our digital strategy in the meantime that is rapidly supporting the maternity team to have an immediate benefit from their service delivery models,” said Arindam Chaudhuri, executive director of digital health at NALHN.
“By unlocking the inherent expertise within frontline clinical, nursing and midwifery teams about what is best for their patients and what will work in their unique clinical settings, leadership teams can accelerate the execution of their digital agendas while simultaneously reducing the burden on frontline staff and increasing care for their consumers,” Personify Care CEO Ken Saman also commented.
