Technology to transform maternity care
Cerner Ireland Regional Executive Amanda Green and Deirdre Hamilton-Stewart, Chief Nursing Officer with Cerner Middle East, explain how an innovative electronic health record system is poised to revolutionise maternity care in Ireland.
More than 75,000 newborns join the Irish population every year. It is our goal to help optimise their safety and well-being – along with that of their mothers – as they prepare to enter and thrive in the world.
To that end, Cerner, as a leading provider of integrated electronic medical record solutions, is excited and honoured to help drive a technology innovation that will revolutionise maternity and neonatal care throughout Ireland. With the HSE’s national team, it is our shared vision to seamlessly unify information capture, access and sharing across all 19 healthcare facilities that provide care for Irish mothers-to-be and their developing infants. It is our goal to create a comprehensive, digital record that consolidates and carries forward every detail of every intervention or episode related to pregnancy, delivery and neonatal care.
A Time for Change
Today, paper-based records and rudimentary labour and delivery applications inhibit healthcare communication, invite delay and hinder decision-making across the Irish healthcare system. It is our mission to implement a single, integrated electronic medical record that spans the health system, supporting clinicians in making timely, informed decisions on behalf of pregnant women and their babies regardless of when or where they present for treatment, from routine to emergency and everything in between.
Once complete, this national maternity care solution will rapidly and accurately consolidate information on allergies, risk factors, assessments, medications, prescriptions, documentation, device connectivity, foetal monitoring and more. It will serve clinicians as a source of truth, a trusted display of current, complete information, empowering decision-making and supporting collaboration. It will eliminate the burden of responsibility that patients bear today, that of collecting and carrying their own medical details from provider to provider, venue to venue. It will capture and share information on newborns who require extended care after birth, continuing the record until the infant, too, is ready for safe discharge. And finally, the record will remain complete and intact over time, ready to present a relevant history and then continue forward should a woman become pregnant in future with additional children.
The anticipated result: a seamless, complete, reliable source of all the information that clinicians require to quickly and to accurately make care decisions for the optimal well-being of mothers and infants across Ireland. In the case of all healthcare needs, but particularly in the case of care during pregnancy, when babies-to-be may not always follow expected timelines and care pathways, the ability for clinicians to access complete information from any place at any time can be critical to patient outcomes.
With 4.5 million residents, Ireland today boasts the highest birth rate in the EU. It is a population ripe for and deserving of healthcare innovation. With the new system in place – a three-year initiative in which the first hospitals will go live on the electronic record in early 2016 – maternity patients will, for the first time in the nation’s history, experience a 19-hospital health network that operates as a seamless, unified entity with resources across the country coordinated to promote the safety and good health of expecting women and their newborns.
A Powerful Partnership
A 35-year leader in the healthcare information technology arena, Cerner is the right partner to help revolutionise care processes in Ireland. Our national project team is highly experienced, bringing the knowledge of successful implementations from around the world to the Irish national maternity project.
Our local resources are dedicated to improving healthcare processes for their home population, committed to determining and designing the local customisations that will ensure the solution’s effectiveness in this specific environment. The combination is one that presents the crucial balance of proven experience and local insight – with significant enthusiasm interwoven throughout.
Cerner teams, for example, have helped drive electronic medical record success not only in the United States, but in the UK, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few initiatives in which resources now assigned in Ireland played critical roles and amassed critical experience.
In each case, the projects benefited from the accumulated knowledge of past efforts, but also presented aspects unique to each nation – such as, in Egypt, the necessity to teach English and computer skills before the electronic record could even begin to be introduced – aspects the project teams committed to solving uniquely one case at a time. In multiple instances, Irish nationals assigned to these global efforts are now excited to bring their experience back for the benefit of their own nation.
Ireland’s maternal and neonatal electronic medical record will improve clinical communication together with other well-recognised benefits. It will, because of its structure, also aim to establish standardised clinical databases which will be essential for clinical audit, clinical governance and research. The Ten Group Classification System and its component parts, recently endorsed by the WHO, will be a central component of this clinical structure, ensuring data quality as well as quality care.
Ireland’s new system will benefit from worldwide best practices as well as enabling new discoveries. It is hoped that the Ten Groups Classification will be further developed within the system to provide audit of post-natal outcomes. The system design will also incorporate maternal early warning scores and paediatric early warning scores defined by local clinical teams.
In addition to effective system design, training and education are critical. We are committed to providing this insight, both for clinicians who will utilise the system and for the patient population eager to better understand how the national maternity record system will change processes and change lives.
A Promising Future
Health stories in recent decades have too often highlighted the healthcare system’s dangers, failures and the incidence of early deaths, carrying speculation that different circumstances could have yielded more positive outcomes. It is our belief that system innovation is the key to minimising these sad stories, instead promoting a culture of efficiency, accuracy, timeliness and collaboration to safeguard patients of all ages.
A paper chart can be held by only one pair of hands at a time. An electronic chart can be shared and leveraged by clinicians across the country, simultaneously, to empower them to collaborate to provide the best possible care for Ireland’s mothers-to-be and infants on the way. In the words of Dr Mike Robson, National Clinical Lead on the MN-CMS programme, we are “achieving complexity through simplicity.”
Cerner Ireland Ltd
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Tel: + 353 (0)1 256 3100
Web: www.cerner.ie
