Addressing Critical Needs in Maternal and Infant Health Data Sharing

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KONZA National Network, a non-profit Health Information Exchange (HIE) and Designated Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN™), today announced the launch of Birth Connect to provide timely alerts to OB/GYNs that a birth parent under their care has delivered a baby.

The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries, according to a March 2024 report by The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The report, “Interoperability of Maternity Health Care Records,” emphasizes the critical need for comprehensive and timely data sharing to improve health outcomes for birth parents and newborns.

KONZA’s Birth Connect directly responds to this call by linking medical records of birth parents and newborns, ensuring that healthcare providers in the full continuum of care have access to complete and accurate data. This enables quicker response to potential complications and supports health needs in the early stages of life, while ensuring effective care coordination, seamless post-birth transition and continuous health monitoring.

Bridging the Data Gap

This innovative, first-of-its-kind product solves several persistent problems:

• Due to interoperability issues between electronic medical records, physicians outside the birth hospital may not know about the birth for days or weeks, causing critical delays in providing essential immediate care for both parent and baby.
  
• Infant medical record loss is common because newborns are often initially named “Baby Girl/Baby Boy + parent’s last name,” making it difficult to link records once the baby receives a full name.
  
• Accurate birth outcomes are essential for quality improvement initiatives, as incomplete data prevents a full understanding of issues related to poor outcomes.

Key Features

• Birth Connect facilitates advanced data collection to ensure high-quality data sharing, reducing the risk of infant medical record loss and supporting quality improvement initiatives.
  
• Birth Connect’s timely alerts for NICU admissions enhances newborn safety and care quality while enabling healthcare providers to analyze prevention efforts and identify public health trends.
  
• The integration of Birth Connect streamlines Quality Reporting, reducing the manual workload typically associated with it, while improving the workflow for healthcare providers to ensure critical health information is promptly available.

The Pilot Site 

KONZA worked closely with Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut to develop and pilot Birth Connect throughout 2023 and early 2024.

“Hartford Healthcare was honored to be the pilot site for KONZA’s Birth Connect product,” said Lisa Shubitowski, Interoperability Solutions Architect. ”Birth Connect allows us to utilize existing technologies in new and innovative ways to communicate critical health events to healthcare providers in the community in support of our patients.” 

Unique Alerting Use Cases

KONZA is committed to investing in the development of products that leverage HIE data to address emerging critical health and communication challenges that are national in scope and too complex for a single system to manage.

“Alerting products are rapidly evolving,” said Laura McCrary, EdD, President and CEO of KONZA. “Traditionally used to notify providers of patient admissions and discharges, these systems can now alert providers about critical health events or high-risk situations. KONZA has now developed and deployed three key clinical alert modalities, and we are collaborating with University of Connecticut researchers on the development of a fourth for suicide prevention.”

KONZA’s other alerting products include:

• Multidrug-Resistant Organism (MDRO) Alerts: Notify hospitals of active MDRO diagnoses, enabling rapid implementation of transmission-based safety protocols.
  
• Behavioral Health Alerts: Provide clinicians with critical insights into a patient’s behavioral health history and ICD diagnosis codes after emergency department visits for mental illness.