Management Consultants and Technology Services (MCATS) are the brains behind Birthing Outcomes System (BOS), the clinician-friendly, midwife-designed, integrated pregnancy, birth, neonatal and domiciliary care record.
MCATS is 100% Australian-owned and has been actively providing consultancy services to health agencies and statutory groups since 1988. MCATS personnel have many combined years of experience in a variety of Clinical, Administrative and Technology roles in Health, Government and Commercial agencies.
We also provide high level consultancy to health service organisations requiring assistance with interpretation and implementation in relation to new and revised systems and quality management. Systems may be both process and technology based.
Promoting patient-clinician dialogue and communication between providers of maternal and neonatal care are core principles of BOS interface design. The mother's and baby's journey is documented on an integrated pregnancy, intrapartum, postpartum, SCN and domiciliary record, accessible throughout the hospital. Using virtualisation, BOS may be accessed securely outside of the hospital, which enables real-time domiciliary Care Pathway assessment in the patient's home. The Management Plan facilitates the transfer of care between clinicians, ensuring tests and follow-up actions are performed as scheduled. The quality of care received by mothers and babies, and their safety too, is positively impacted as learning is derived from stored histories. Aggregate BOS data is crucial to those involved in accreditation processes, such as that conducted by Australian Council on Healthcare Standards ACHS) and Baby-Friendly Health Initiative (BFHI).
Since its inception over 25 years ago, the development of BOS has been driven by midwives and nurses. It was built from the ground up to support maternity and newborn services; it is not a modified generic electronic health record. BOS has reduced the burden of paperwork and periodic reporting, allowing clinicians to focus on care of mothers and neonates. The BOS User Group, made up of representatives from over 50 maternity services, meets bi-monthly to raise, argue and approve enhancements which shape the future of the system. Engaging key staff in this way fosters ownership of clinical objectives underlying the application, resulting in sustained realisation of benefits over time.
We understand the challenge of balancing epidemiological goals with the need for a clinician-friendly application. BOS is the mainstay for the Perinatal Data Collection, allowing sites to electronically submit birth records with minimum overhead and total compliance with statutory data-quality requirements. Aggregated data is produced for national Clinical Indicators sets, which provide the impetus for improvements in best practice. Research initiatives and academic studies are made possible by built-in reports as well as the Ad Hoc Data Extract tool. Example beneficiaries of data collected by BOS include: Hospital-Acquired Infection Surveillance Program (VICNISS), Infant Hearing Screening Program (VIHSP) and Women's and Children's Healthcare Australasia (WHA).
As hospitals move towards digitising and centralising medical records, it becomes important for a best-of-breed application, such as BOS, to share information with other applications. BOS integrates with the longitudinal patient record by exporting antenatal, birthing and discharge summaries to eMR (or eHR) repositories like CPF, BOSSnet and Cerner. Data is also shared at an atomic level with clinical systems in other functional areas such as NICU or Fetal Monitoring. BOS may be operated over a mobile device via virtualisation software such as Citrix, enabling real-time, secure access to the birth record residing at the hospital.