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This week the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) announced a Privacy and Security Mobile Device Project. The goal is to help protect health information while using mobile devices (e.g., laptops, tablets, and smartphones). This will certainly be welcome information for midwives on the go with their smart …

While government and private initiatives are now encouraging a patient centered system of care delivery that includes electronic access to their health records, midwives know the key to a healthy system lies in a woman’s perceptions of her options, rights and inherent power.  By sharing not just the data in the chart but a summary …

New research suggests they might. All this effort to convert US providers from paper to electronic charting is fundamentally about improving outcomes for patients, but until recently there wasn’t much evidence to suggest that it might work. A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine found significant improvements in the standards …

After I shot this video our midwife co-founder, Brynne Potter added: We have the large one at the office and I also have the mobile version at home. The desktop model is worth the extra money if you have the space. It is faster, never jams, and you can scan an entire chart at once …

This last article in our 3 part series on HIPAA Privacy and Security is going to focus on the Security Rule and how it relates to a typical midwife workflow. As we said in our article on The Basics of the HIPAA Rules, most of the safeguards midwives need to take are based on common …

Imagine if in 1925 when Mary Breckinridge founded the Frontier Nurse Service, and pioneered nurse-midwifery and rural healthcare in the US, she had to maintain HIPAA-compliance. Traveling on her horse caring for the women of Appalachia, obtaining written authorizations and informed disclosures would have been as foreign as the professionalized midwifery model she introduced.

The biggest concerns we hear from midwives about their charts center around HIPAA. They wonder whether they need to comply, or more importantly how to do so in a way that retains the personal and flexible style of practice that is inherent to midwifery. As it’s a 1,000 page law with numerous subsections and amendments, …

The system that we develop to do tasks that we do over and over is called a workflow. Workflows keep us from forgetting to do certain small things or save us time when we have to go back to something because we know where we left off. Sorting your mail is a good common example: …

British midwives don’t “take a patient’s medical history” they “listen to her story”. As Certified Nurse Midwife Holly Kennedy, president of ACNM, highlighted in her qualitative study of “normalized birth” in the UK, this simple semantic difference can lead to a dramatic change in how care is perceived by our clients. Midwives in the US …

Coordination between care providers is recognized as an important component of high quality maternity care [1]. However, most maternity care providers in the US work in a climate that does not support genuine and effective communication[2]. Providers face multiple obstacles to collaboration, from concerns about liability to cultural influences. Despite the convergence of mandates for …