The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network has digitised its delivery of prenatal care to reduce the administrative burden on its midwives while enabling personalised support to pregnant women.

Pregnancy Online Platform NALHN (POPN) was developed in partnership with Personify Care, which has powered the system with digital pathways that deliver information specific to a woman's stage of pregnancy. The technology also automatically captures and screens clinical data points from consumers.

WHY IT MATTERS

According to a media release, POPN is able to rapidly identify patients who are in need of additional tests or support prior to their first appointment with a midwife. It replaces the network's previous paper-based process which relies on making phone calls to triage risks for expectant mothers at their first consult.

Since digitising their workflows, clinical staff has seen increased attendance rates, reduced waitlists for appointments, and enhanced midwifery care.

Julia Dalton, midwifery lead of the NALHN POPN project, claims that "91% of users who have previously given birth with NALHN consider 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 intend to digitise the workflows in other elective surgery specialities.

THE LARGER 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, the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, was able to launch a surgical pre-rehabilitation programme, which helps patients become fit for surgery. The health IT firm also delivered its technology to digitise the Direct Access Colonoscopy programme of The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, also part of CALHN.

Personify Care has also powered the home care programme of St John of God Murdoch Hospital in Perth. The programme has since been expanded from general surgery to specialist surgery wards.

ON THE RECORD

For this digital transformation project, NALHN midwives and obstetricians have been designated as digital leads to ensure that clinical teams were in control of their workflows and protocols from the start.

"By working collaboratively with Personify Care to support ‘digital leads’ within each clinical team and decentralising the digital transformation of the patient pathways, we’ve ensured that the solution meets the needs of our staff and consumers and fits within our digital strategy while rapidly supporting the maternity team to have an immediate benefit to their service delivery models," said Arindam Chaudhuri, executive director of digital health at NALHN.

"By unlocking the expertise inherent within frontline clinical, nursing and midwifery teams in relation to what’s 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 enhancing care for their consumers," Personify Care CEO Ken Saman also commented.