Digital Transformation with a Difference: NALHN co-design a Pregnancy Online Platform that actually works.

The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network (NALHN) are leveraging Personify Care’s digital patient pathways to unburdens midwives, detects early-pregnancy risks, and empowers pregnant women to navigate their pregnancy and care.

The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network (NALHN) introduced a digital platform to engage pregnant women as soon as they are referred to NALHN for antenatal care, allowing women to be more informed and involved in their care.

Why NALHN explored digital pathways for antenatal care:

• 25-30% of women were being booked into the wrong triage appointments
• Delays in some 1st registrar / consultant appointments
• Delays in processing referrals
• Early miscarriages – no pregnancy/medical history available for staff if not had a triage appointment
• 73% of our consumers never read the NALHN antenatal booklet – too long, too time consuming to read and not relevant
• 0% use the handouts provided
• 66% of consumer will google search if they have questions

Aim of the digital pathways experience:

• Reduce the number of incorrect triage bookings
• Ensure all women who need an early obstetric review are booked for one
• Medical and Obstetric history is available prior to triage
• Encourage women to engage with a GP early in pregnancy
• Allow midwives more time to educate women at their triage appointment instead of chasing results
• Provide ongoing education to women that’s timely and relevant throughout their pregnancy and antenatal journey

Role of ‘digital enablers’ : NALHN’s unique approach to rapidly implement co-designed pathways

The novel approach, taken by NALHN to this digital transformation initiative, invited midwives and obstetricians to become ‘digital leads’ – this ensured that clinical teams were in control of their workflows and protocols from the outset. Through its unique collaboration with Personify Care, NALHN retains ownership and control of their clinical protocols whilst leveraging data-driven patient pathways. The result has rapidly reduced the administrative burden on their midwives, whilst enabling personalised support for pregnant women.

The Pregnancy Online Platform NALHN (POPN) digital pathways deliver information that’s specific to a woman’s stage of pregnancy and automatically captures and screens clinical data-points from consumers to support existing clinical workflows.

This ensures rapid identification of consumers who are in need of additional tests or support before their first face to face appointments with their midwives. For clinical staff, the digital transformation of their workflows has increased attendance rates, reduced waitlists for appointments, and enhanced midwifery care. 

Not only is the clinician-led approach unique, the successful implementation of the digital pathways comes from the “digital enabler” role of the NAHLN Digital Health team who focus on enabling frontline midwives and obstetricians to co-design consumer Pathways.

“By working collaboratively with our digital partner 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, fits within our digital strategy, while rapidly supporting the maternity team to have an immediate benefit to their service delivery models”. says Arindam Chaudhuri (Executive Director Digital Health, NALHN).

Solving real challenges for midwives and patients

Feedback from users, collected via the Personify Care platform has been overwhelmingly positive according to Julia Dalton PhD, Midwifery Lead at NALHN for POPN. “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,” said Dr Dalton. 

 For Amy who is in her first pregnancy, she has found the information and updates provided through POPN useful. “Your first pregnancy is so overwhelming, so being able to receive information on the type of care I will receive and general information on common symptoms and experiences in pregnancy was really useful. I was able to read through this information at my own time and go back to it when needed. Importantly for me, I was able to digest this information in my own time and attend my first antenatal appointment with prepared questions for my midwife.” said Amy.