Maternity Clinical Information System

KARLENE CLARKE 

Clinical Midwife Specialist

The National Maternity Clinical Information System (MCIS) was rolled out throughout Women’s Health maternity services in October 2015. The implementation followed recommendations from the CM Health external maternity care review in 2012 and was part of a national programme to create a national electronic maternity record.

CM Health was one of the first district health boards to adopt the MCIS (which is known as BadgerNet) and has played a leading role in many of the changes and improvements made to the system over the past 6 years.

With the support of the Healthy Together Technology team, we are now embarking upon a major upgrade to the system view and functionality of the system, by transitioning to the BadgerNet Global View. This change will occur in May 2021.

This upgrade will bring us in line with the enhanced functionality available in the UK version of BadgerNet, including many features that will benefit users and promote safe and transparent care for our women and whaanau. The new system is process-based, incorporating the use of ‘smart’ forms, which will allow for improved workflows. The MCIS team have been busy developing training plans for all our users, and will be rolling out comprehensive education in the form of online learning packages and face-to-face teaching sessions.

Also this year, CleverMed (the developers of BadgerNet) and the Ministry of Health have collaborated to enable maternityrelated data to be reported to the National Maternity DataMart. This means that specific reporting data is now automatically sent from BadgerNet to the Ministry of Health database. Work has also been completed with maternity providers Expect and Solutions Plus to enable an interface with BadgerNet; the interface creates a MCIS record and populates that record to a health board’s booking list. This has helped to reduce the number of paper bookings that CM Health receives each month and ensures timely notification of a woman’s booking with a community lead maternity carer midwife.

Amidst all the disruption 2020 brought, CM Health saw the introduction of a number of new electronic systems, including the Maternity Early Warning Score (MEWS) system, Trendcare and MedChart. These have all successfully been rolled out and users have embedded them into their daily clinical practice.

A recent rollout has seen BadgerNet made available on just under 6000 PCs and devices throughout CM Health, making it available wherever a woman or baby may be.

The MCIS team are excited about the upgrade to BadgerNet this year. We look forward to engaging with our 800-plus users here at CM Health and sharing all the new features that the global view has to offer us.

 MCIS Team. L-R Florella Keen, Karlene Clarke, Michelle

Neustroski, Hayley Gill, Jasmine Sampson