The Better Outcomes Registry and Network (BORN) collects newborn data from hospitals across Ontario, including Grand River Hospital, in order to improve patient care and outcomes. PowerChart, the Electronic Health Information system used at Grand River Hospital is now equipped to automatically send Maternal and Newborn data to BORN.

Maggie Hilton, Integrated Health Informatician Analyst at Grand River Hospital, has spent the last two years coordinating this integration between Grand River Hospital and BORN. With a background as a Registered Nurse in Labour and Delivery and now working to support the Childbirth Program from a digital perspective at the hospital, BORN is an organization that is close to Hilton’s heart.

As Grand River Hospital began the transition to a paperless data management system, BORN was transitioning to a less manual data collection process around the same time. This synchronicity allowed Grand River Hospital to be the first hospital in Ontario to fully integrate with BORN using data interfacing, and this process was highlighted in the BORN Annual Report, published in August of 2021. In September 2021, Hilton virtually presented ‘Design to Support Provincial Reporting of BORN (Better Outcomes Registry & Network) Data’ at the Cerner Canadian Collaboration Forum. This presentation included over 70 participants from hospitals Canada wide.

This innovative process allows for data to be transferred in a more efficient manner, as data was previously physically submitted. This process also reduces workload as clinical staff are able to enter the data directly within Cerner and clerical staff are not required to collect and manually submit the data. The electronic format prevents unnecessary duplication of records and reduces the chance of error.

The BORN Registry is a significantly useful tool for hospitals. For a busy birthing centres like Grand River Hospital where over 4200 births a year occur, contributing data to BORN allows healthcare providers to receive the information and tools to benchmark care amongst peer hospitals as well as providing alerts if maternal and/or newborn outcomes are straying from accepted norms. Transitioning to this integrated reporting system also easily identifies gaps in information. In addition to monitoring clinical performance indicators, the BORN data is also used for financial planning for the childbirth program.

“The most beneficial part of the integration with BORN has been the improvement to our workflow,” Hilton explains. “The integration forced us to rethink and test our existing processes to find how we could become more efficient while maintaining high quality data collection.”

This story is an excerpt from the most recent edition of “ACTION at Grand River Hospital”: the Hospital's biannual publication that highlights the innovations we have launched with our partners to increase the number of positive patient outcomes and experiences at Grand River Hospital, in the community, and at home.

Read the full length ACTION piece for other stories on innovation at Grand River.