High-tech Deliveries

Can a Computer Program Increase Delivery Room Safety?

By Teri Brown

Medical errors are always disturbing, but perhaps the most heartbreaking are those that occur in the delivery room. While the majority of physicians and nurses practice quality medicine and do their jobs admirably, they are also human. Because of the environment, delivery rooms can become disorganized and stressful, and an overworked staff is often required to deal with emergencies and multitask in less than optimum conditions.

"It is in those critical moments they may fail to correctly realize the entire clinical picture, and become 'blinded' to factors essential to providing the appropriate care," says Dr. Eyal Ephrat, an obstetrician and CEO of E&C Medical Intelligence. "This is when most errors occur and when it's most critical to prevent them."

Dr. Ephrat designed a real-time intelligent system that accurately understands the clinical situation like a physician and a nurse would, but never becomes overworked or distressed, and is always excellent at multitasking.

According to Dr. Ephrat, the Intelligent Patient Record for Obstetrics (IPROB) is a valuable tool to ensure that errors are immediately identified and reversed before they could potentially cause damage to a mother or her baby.

IPROB functions as a complete intelligent obstetrics chart for physicians and nurses – paper charts are eliminated and all records are maintained on a computer. In addition to being an electronic medical record, IPROB contains a knowledgebase of more than 6,500 best practice guidelines and rules in obstetrics and nearly 200,000 clinical data fields.

The system accurately understands the clinical situation of the patient at any given moment, and is therefore able to recognize the critical actions, decisions, documentation and diagnoses the staff need to perform in order to provide the best care.

Based on the specific clinical situation and the hospital's best practices, the system reacts in real time and generates prompts, alerts, reminders and suggestions that assist the staff to provide the best expected care and, most important, to avoid errors as they occur.

"E&C Medical Intelligence invested more than 400 clinician years of obstetrical experience into the development of IPROB to create a highly accurate knowledgebase of more than 6,500 best practice guidelines and rules in obstetrics," Dr. Ephrat says. "This, with an advanced expert systems technology we developed, enables the system to assist the staff, in real time, in providing the best patient care and avoiding mistakes."

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