HIT 674 Quality and Process Improvement with Health IT Semester Project

Home Monitoring of High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy: An Innovative App to Monitor Women’s Health during Pregnancy

Be sure to reference material from class, the textbook, and related professional experience.

https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/16.%20St%20George%27s_HaMpton_v2.pdf

Additional links/resources

Background  Pre-eclampsia/risks for pregnant women

 

Program Goals

The goal of this quality improvement program was to address the risk of complications introduced by hypertensive disorders and its effects on pregnancies The program was run by the maternity/day assessment unit at St George’s University Hospitals in London. The program aimed to provide a new and innovative approach to monitoring hypertension to reduce these risks of complications. With this program, a smartphone app was used to both monitor hypertension as well as aid in the identification of pre-eclampsia in pregnant women to detect any abnormalities more early on than a routine hospital visit. Similarly, through this program, pregnant women had the ability to monitor these factors at home and the process incorporated alerts if a concern arose to go to the hospital for further assessment if needed. A major goal of the program was to allow women to have a role in their assessments, contribute to improving patient experience through paving a way for improved patient centered care, and reduce the amount of time patients needed to spend in the hospital waiting. Overall it aimed to provide pregnant women with improved quality of care to improve their satisfaction and ensure the best health outcomes during their pregnancy.

 

Review/Design of Project

During the term of a pregnancy, there are several data and values that must be kept track of to ensure the health of both mothers and babies in regards to various aspects of their health. A major aspect being their blood pressure levels, as abnormalities in this regard can indicate possible risks that need to be addressed. Pregnant women must often make frequent visits to the hospital to keep track of this data, involving long wait times for both the patients and providers, and the possibility of delay of detection of certain health statistics. This project aimed to address these risks to introduce an easy and efficient design process to track blood pressure levels and urine test results from home to allow quick transfer of data. The overall process of the project involved women tracking their blood pressure readings and urine test results at home and inputting the data in the app. The design of the project was focused on the patient, to enable more patient involvement to be effective and beneficial to both patients and providers.They were also presented with questions on the app to contribute to identifying if they were experiencing symptoms of pre-eclampsia.

Women entered their blood pressure and urine test results into the app along with answers to questions which were then transferred to the hospital computer and monitored by providers in real time.  The design of the project involved ensuring that the hospital’s computer system was securely and accurately linked to the newly developed app. The design process of the project was effective as it considered healthcare aims in its design including safety, effectiveness, patient-centered care, timeliness, efficiency, and equity.

Results

This link includes some results – https://solutions.hsj.co.uk/story.aspx?storyCode=7019192&preview=1&hash=278452BE15CEADA86A500D6EB018D31F

Key Stakeholders

Review the design of the improvement project (discussed in earlier paragraph), understanding the key stakeholders involved, processes, tools, and barriers.

Stakeholders by definition refer to a group of individuals who are concerned about a particular organizational system’s movements and decision making. For this particular organizational system, the St. George’s University Hospitals, the stakeholders should consist of the below members. The leadership members in the St. George’s University Hospitals, the National Health Service Foundation of London, the management team of St. George’s, quality team, patients as well as the Health IT vendor who have developed this home monitoring application for pregnant patients.

Role of Stakeholders

  • demonstrate a potential return on investment (or loss), list the stakeholders involved and how each contributed to the project outcomes, list the stakeholders left out and how that affected the project, and use all relevant data available.

Conclusion

State the specific goals of the program and the measures addressed. Based on this information, determine whether the project was successful. Why or why not? How did you measure success? Will it last?

Considering the goals of this quality improvement program, the effectiveness of the program can be demonstrated through its positive impacts and its success in meeting healthcare aims. Success can be measured in terms of the impact that the project had on both patients and providers and whether these impacts can make a positive difference in the way healthcare is provided to pregnant women in the future. Using the data gathered and the outcomes, in terms of effectiveness, there was a report in which 94.5% of women indicated patient satisfaction, indicating its positive impact. This was in terms of patient satisfaction, involvement in care, reduced anxiety, and app time. This not only positively impacted patients, but feedback from staff also indicated positive impacts including increased amount of time to allot to other appointments. Since data was able to be collected and gathered at home, it was easily transferable through the app and made data easily and quickly available to providers to make prompt decisions as needed. It also increased efficiency by decreasing the amount of time pregnant women needed to wait to receive effective care. One shortcoming that the project aims to address in the future is providing a way for users who are not as proficient in English to also be able to implement and use the app easily by providing a platform that is language friendly and user friendly.

References

Sheehan, E., & Khalil, A. (2017, February). Home Monitoring of Hypertension in Pregnancy (HaMpton). The Health Foundation. Retrieved November 29, 2022, from https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/16.%20St%20George%27s_HaMpton_v2.pdf