PeriGen Congratulates Banner Health Instituting Successful Care Quality Initiative Reducing Unnecessary Early-Term Deliveries By 22 Percent

The Arizona Quality Alliance Award recipient used perinatal electronic health record data to facilitate medical practice change across 19 facilities

PeriGen, the global leader in applying real-time clinical decision support to perinatal systems, applauds Banner Health for successfully reducing elective deliveries of babies at less than 39 weeks and earning a Showcase in Excellence Award from the Arizona Quality Alliance. Banner Health is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare systems in the country. 

Avoiding unnecessary early-term deliveries is a best practice advocated by obstetrical professional organizations and national quality organizations. Research demonstrates that elective deliveries before 39 weeks increase the risk of newborn respiratory problems and lengths of stay for mothers and babies. 

Banner Health used both historical and real-time data gathered from PeriBirth®, PeriGen's electronic health record (EHR) designed specifically for obstetric (OB) care. The captured data helped the health system establish a baseline and monitor ongoing compliance of the new protocol across 19 hospitals. As a result of this quality initiative, the number of elective deliveries at less than 39 weeks decreased by 22 percent over the first six months, representing more than 2,600 more babies per year being delivered at term. 

"We are thrilled to play a part in Banner Health's success as they pioneer system-wide adherence to a widely endorsed obstetrics best practice," said PeriGen Chief Executive Officer Matthew Sappern. "Our company's mission is to deliver the most medically relevant information at the most relevant time to help clinicians make knowledge-driven decisions. We commend Banner Health for using this information to further its commitment to data-driven, evidence-based practice safeguarding the delivery of healthier infants." 

Implementing Evidence-based Best Practice Enterprise-wide 

An organization recognized nationally for using technology to improve care quality, Banner Health leveraged its established system of clinical performance groups (CPGs) to drive this initiative. Once the groups identified elective deliveries before 39 weeks as its target standard, clinicians and staff members developed a process that could be deployed enterprise-wide to evaluate the medical necessity of such a delivery before scheduling a patient for an early induction or cesarean section.

A key step in the protocol's implementation was to pull several years of historical data from the PeriBirth system into an enterprise data warehouse. From this data, the team was able to pinpoint each hospital's current and historical rate of elective deliveries before 39 weeks and gaps in documentation. The CPG was able to establish a baseline for measuring future performance and to identify which hospitals would require more education and attention. 

As the health system implemented the new protocol, PeriBirth played a key role in helping the CPG track each facility's and provider's compliance. 

"Data from PeriBirth was hugely instrumental in giving us a true reading of data rates to quickly determine who was following the protocol," said Barbara LaBranche, MBA, B.S.N., R.N., senior director of clinical informatics at Banner Health Corporate and co-leader of the initiative. "Up until now we've relied on coded data four to six weeks after the fact. With our new system, we're able to give physicians feedback in as near to real time as possible, which is much more effective for prompting practice change. It's hard to argue with numbers."

Banner Health has now developed a dashboard for monitoring this perinatal standard. The dashboard extracts data from PeriBirth and its reporting tool nightly to give care providers and administrators near real-time information. The data outcomes enable OB managers to review and compare compliance with quality measures at the system, facility, unit and physician level. 

About Banner Health

Headquartered in Phoenix, Banner Health is one of the largest, nonprofit health care systems in the country. The system manages 23 acute-care hospitals, the Banner Health Network and Banner Medical Group, long-term care centers, outpatient surgery centers and an array of other services including family clinics, home care and hospice services, and a nursing registry. Banner Health is in seven states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Wyoming. For more information, visit www.bannerhealth.com. 

About PeriGen, Inc.

PeriGen, Inc., is an innovative provider of fetal surveillance systems employing patented, pattern-recognition and obstetrics technologies that empower perinatal clinicians to make confident, real-time decisions about the mothers and babies in their care. PeriGen's customer-centric team of clinicians and technologists builds the most advanced systems available to augment obstetric decision-making and improve communications among the clinical team at the point of care, while supporting data flow between healthcare IT systems. 

PeriGen's unique fetal surveillance products provide dynamic visual cues that direct clinicians to the most essential patient information displayed on the screen. Unlike legacy fetal monitoring devices and software from non-specialist companies, PeriGen Visual Cueing™ provides an instant view of the mother's and baby's current status and trends over time to avoid errors, increasing patient safety and reducing risk for clinicians and hospitals. For more information, please visit us at www.PeriGen.com.