Developing an interactive electronic maternity record

Abstract

Women have a strong need to be involved in their own maternity care. Pregnancy hand-held records encourage women's participation in their maternity care; gives them an increased sense of control and improves communication amongst care providers. They have been successfully used in the United Kingdom and New Zealand for almost 20 years. Despite evidence that supports the use of handheld records, widespread introduction has not occurred in Australia. The need for an electronic version of pregnancy handheld records has become apparent, especially after the introduction of the Electronic Medical Record in Australia. We developed a personal digital assistant (PDA) as an interactive antenatal electronic maternity record that health care providers could use in any setting and women could access using the internet. This paper will describe the testing of the antenatal electronic maternity record.

Addressing the Confidentiality and Integrity of Assistive Care Loop Framework Using Wireless Sensor Networks

“…This information, in the presence of third parties at home, is believed to pose confidentiality problems for the pregnant women. It is also necessary to ensure that women should not alter their information without discussions with their care provider [9].…”

“…However, the PDA application, the Obi-MATE [2,9], is a stand-alone monitoring application, whose operational authenticity is achieved by sending encrypted username/passwords as a SOAP message through the authentication module. Once authenticated, the user can then see the monitoring module in the PDA, which is coupled with the authentication module.…”

“…As stated in [1], such a pull-design in a PDA requires an inequality to be programmed into the PDA to mitigate the loss of data in the base station buffer. Finally, the PDA application Obi-MATE [2,9] completes the design by processing and filtering the collected data. Although fewer physical adversaries (as sensors are on the patient's body) can be expected in the BAWSN of the ACLF, when compared with other sensitive sensor applications (such as deployments in military-related surveillance), our study revealed that the BAWSN is constantly exposed to severe threats, at the least because of their HDLC-like data format [6,7].…”

Data re-entry overload: time for a paradigm shift in maternity IT?

“…32 Accessibility was also highlighted as a limitation of a recent Australian pilot project using personal digital assistant (PDA) devices. 33 Although there was a high satisfaction rate among participants in a recent Swiss trial of USB memory sticks, computer access remains a barrier to use. 34 Computer records are like rigid railways not flexible roads Cost-effective maternity IT systems allow pregnancy data to be entered as a complex series of flow-patterned questions.…”

The use of an electronic health record (EHR) in a maternity shared-care environment

“…Pregnant women are a group of patients that are information 'savvy', along with patients in the child-health or disability group or those who want to monitor their diabetes, chronic disease and mental illness (86)(87)(88)(89)(90). This is reinforced in a recent review suggesting that Internet use and availability of medical information on the web have made patients more aware of symptoms, diagnostic tests and treatments.…”