The synchronized system for obstetrical care

Creating a connection between Epic and IntelliSpace Perinatal was complex because it required supporting the flow of information across many locations of the hospital.

Patient safety is the priority for all staff members on the maternity ward, especially when things become stressful. “Our work can be very chaotic with lots of surprises, so it’s important for us to have a perinatal monitoring system that we can blindly trust. We have to know that we are putting the right data from the right patient in the right file,” said Lida Flapper, MCL Clinical Manager of IntelliSpace Perinatal.

To provide a current and unified record for each patient, Epic and IntelliSpace Perinatal use context synchronization, which keeps the patient or user focus in sync between the two systems. When a user selects a patient in the Epic system, IntelliSpace Perinatal automatically also selects the same patient. Both applications can be accessed via the same workstation.

In the department’s previous perinatal system, staff might sometimes work in two different patient files at the same time, meaning they could inadvertently enter data from patient A into the folder of patient B.

IntelliSpace Perinatal allows staff members to monitor the status of all patients in labor at the hospital: in display screens in the maternity ward, intensive care, outpatient clinic and surgical recovery room. Flapper said she recently saw a child with a bad CTG on her IntelliSpace Perinatal screen in another room and could bring that to the attention of her colleagues in the outpatient clinic.

“IntelliSpace Perinatal is beneficial not only for the mother and child, but it also supports us as medical staff by alerting us to potentially dangerous situations. In our case, it fosters better communication between staff on the maternity ward and different hospital locations,” says Flapper.

The department’s obstetricians can log into the system from home and view everything in the application. This allows them to consult with a physician’s assistant who is on the ward. Flapper says, “This capability is extremely important for our process. A mother in labor is going through an extremely fragile process, and we want to do everything we can to make it go smoothly and to intervene immediately if the patient has an issue.”

IntelliSpace Perinatal is designed to simplify maintenance and updates for IT departments. “If there is an update for an application, we can plan it in. That is important, because when we are doing an update, we switch to the emergency protocol and the nurses have to go back to pen and paper. Fortunately, we can do a lot remotely and we can first test an upgrade offline so we know exactly how long it will take and what issues we might have. That allows us to limit our downtime as much as possible,” said Thony van der Veen, MCL Technical Application Manager.

Many parties worked intensively to implement the connection between the IntelliSpace Perinatal system and Epic: the MCL applications, ICT and medical technology specialists, Philips distributor – GrafiMedics, Philips IT specialists and the Epic engineers. Colleagues from the MCL Medical Technical Department were involved from the start in the project and played a significant role in successfully implementing Philips hardware in the hospital infrastructure.

“Philips understands how the care process works in obstetrics departments, with the mother and child. That is an advantage. We received a lot of support from Philips and had a real lifeline with them when we were making the switch and that continues today. I trust Philips. They have sound expertise, and they are not hesitant to share their expertise with us.”