Perinatal Software Plays a Large Role in OB Safety
December 1, 2023
By Greg Freeman
The clinical benefits of perinatal software are well known to those who work in labor and delivery, but the risk management potential can be underestimated.
Perinatal monitoring software helps clinicians closely observe the health of the baby during labor, but if something goes wrong it also can provide a record that helps show the adverse outcome was not caused by negligence, says Matthew Sappern, CEO of PeriGen, a company based in Cary, NC, that offers perinatal software. Other companies offering perinatal software include GE Healthcare, Phillips, and Obix.
With childbirth complications among the most litigious medical malpractice cases, risk managers should look to perinatal software to improve patient safety, Sappern says. A prime benefit is that software provides an objective analysis of data points that might otherwise require a nurse to interpret them.
Avoid Normalization of Deviance
In particular, software can help avoid the “normalization of deviance,” in which clinicians dismiss problematic data because they have seen most such cases turn out fine in the end.
“They’ve kind of gotten it ingrained in their mind that things are probably fine. There also can be a bit of friction between the nurse and the physician if the nurse is calling the physician late at night,” Sappern notes. “You have normalization of deviance, you’ve got discrepancies in education and experience, and then you’ve got the fact that nurses are just people who might have given up smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, or they might have had an argument with their spouse or partner. The software overcomes some of that.”
The objective data can be more convincing than the nurse’s interpretation of the situation, Sappern says. It creates a reliable record of the labor and delivery. The software also can alert nurses to changing conditions that might have gone unnoticed between bedside checks.
“It’s really important because it helps the clinicians and the physicians have an objective data source, to kind of bring them back to that moment and determine whether there’s something to do or not,” Sappern says. “The nurse can show that she spoke with the physician, that she conferred with her charge nurse or her colleagues, and that automatically helps a lot when it comes to the bad outcomes.”
SOURCE
- Matthew Sappern, CEO, PeriGen, Cary, NC. Phone: (984) 208-4250.
The clinical benefits of perinatal software are well known to those who work in labor and delivery, but the risk management potential can be underestimated.
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