Showcasing the Wellbeing Maternity Personal Health Record at the Royal College of Midwives Annual Conference

The Royal College of Midwives held its annual conference earlier this month. Over two days, more than 3,500 midwives and midwifery students from across the UK heard from leading speakers on the latest topics in midwifery care, attended sessions on topics ranging from multidisciplinary team working to perinatal mental health, and explored exhibitions from over 60 companies, organisations and stakeholders.

Wellbeing Software was one of these exhibitors. While at the conference we were delighted to showcase one of our newest innovations – a Personal Health Record (PHR) that aims to provide expectant and new mothers with a single online source of information relating to their pregnancy, antenatal and postnatal care.

Introducing Wellbeing Maternity’s PHR

Information is key to enabling patients in any healthcare context to feel more comfortable and empowered, to make better-informed decisions when required and to navigate their particular healthcare journey. In the case of pregnancy, antenatal and postnatal care, whereby women typically transition between multiple different services and are simultaneously making a wealth of broader life decisions, having comprehensive and accurate access to relevant information is particularly important.

The PHR we have developed aims to offer two things. First, it provides each woman with access to their own pregnancy medical records, including all of their pre and post-pregnancy appointments. This makes it easier to find vital information and offers greater peace of mind when moving between services, allowing them to review notes whenever they wish.

Second, expectant and new mothers can access a broad range of information and advice relating to pregnancy and any specific conditions. This reduces the need to carry around bulky paper formats and makes it easier for information to be shared and discussed with friends and family as required or referred to in future appointments.

The PHR is a fully integrated part of the Euroking Maternity Information System, the UK’s leading such solution for healthcare professionals to access medical records and obtain information relating to patients during pregnancy. This means that confidential information on the mother and private communications which are recorded on the Euroking platform are also secured within the PHR, ensuring that all data is only accessible to the relevant users.

The future of Midwifery care

 The RCM conference gave us an insight into how we truly differentiate ourselves, offering the ability to capture an ever growing dataset in a simple easy to use flow; ensuring no information is missing at any given contact within the service. We see our PHR becoming part of the next generation of midwifery care, which is why it was so encouraging to present it to some of most forward-thinking and ambitious midwives of today, and the student stars of the future.

The conference also gave us to opportunity to hold several demonstrations of our CTG Archive and Central Monitoring product, showing off the new livery and additional features. We were also privileged to have Professor Julia Sanders on the stand, drumming up support for the waterbirth study which is currently being undertaken by Cardiff University to establish the safety of waterbirth for mothers and babies by using data from EuroKing hospitals.

The launch of the Personal Health Record is part of Wellbeing’s wider Healthcare: Connected vision. We are passionate about the benefits for patients and medical practitioners alike that result from digitising and consolidating multiple sources of healthcare information, and placing it at the fingertips of patients and clinicians.