K2 Guardian® – Clinical Data Capture & Bedside Monitoring

Increase Contact Time, Improve Data Collection, Enhance Auditing Capability

Video Transcript

Every baby deserves the best start in life, but the process of birth isn’t always straightforward and can present difficult challenges for doctors and midwives. K2 INFANT-Guardian has been developed to help prevent stillbirths and brain damage, giving clinicians vital support when it’s most needed.

This revolutionary new NHS trialled software is proven to support reduction of risk of a baby dying, or being brain damaged during labour. It interprets the CTG trace of the detail heart rate, providing expert support to clinicians at the bedside. Results show it creates an even lower than low risk environment for high risk births. This pioneering technology has taken 27 years to develop and is designed by K2 Medical Systems, the specialists in maternity software.

The INFANT software runs as a module within Guardian, which was developed first. They both have very different functions, so first, we’re going to see how Guardian works.

“Do you know what you’re having? Boy, Girl?”

“Little Girl”

“Little Girl? Lovely!”

Peterborough City Hospital is one of 40 UK hospitals that rely on Guardian. It captures the fetal heart rate electronically, along with the full clinical notes. With Guardian, there are no paper notes.

“It’s made my job easier so we’re documenting next to the bedside, so that we’re documenting at the point of care. It’s great because it captures things as they happen, it’s great because it means that you’re with your woman and at her side during that time. You’re not having to go away and document things at a desk, or document things in the corner of the room, that you’re with her, that you’re being able to document at the same time. Documentation is so important in midwifery.

Guardian is capturing Hannah’s baby’s monitoring of the fetal heart rate. We’re picking up all the same things that we would have done on paper for the fetal heart rate that we’re looking at, here. But what we’re looking at, which is different, is that we can see all of Hannah’s previous monitorings that she’s had with her baby; monitored throughout the whole of her pregnancy.”

As well as capturing and storing the entire CTG trace, Guardian also stores a full electronic partogram in a format that’s familiar to clinicians.

Guardian automatically computes Modified Early Warning Scores and plots these on an observation chart. There’s also an important clinical planning tool that automatically timetables events, based on hospital guidelines. And there’s note capturing, so no more duplicating written information, saving trust thousands and creating an easy way to audit and improve care.

The other feature of Guardian, which is making a dramatic impact, is that it also transmits this information over the hospital IT network. So senior staff and midwives can view every live CTG trace, together with the full case notes and patient information, wherever they are, including on-call, or at home.

“K2 Guardian has been very helpful in allowing me to view CTGs remotely, so I don’t have to be at the bedside when I’m rung about a patient. I might be doing a peripheral clinic, several miles away, perhaps up in Stamford 15 miles away – 20 minutes by road, but I can look at the trace straight away and then give advice over the phone. I can’t annotate onto the traces; there’s a safety feature that you have to be present with a patient in order to enter anything on to the record, but I can relay instructions to the midwife caring for the woman. I think there’s several advantages, the main one must be a safety aspect, because the chance of human error of a single person not recognising an abnormal heart trace and raising a concern about it is minimised because the likelihood is other people will be able to look at the trace, but it also provides a very valuable learning tool; We can review several traces at once, we don’t have archiving and storage problems, everything is instantly available electronically and we can build up our own library of interesting cases for training and teaching.”

So Guardian creates a high level of vigilance and a greater clinical support network, which reduces the risk of a clinical situation going unnoticed, or undiagnosed.

“It’s become much easier to get the reviews from Doctors, if they’re not able to leave the delivery suite, because our antenatal day unit is downstairs, delivery suite is upstairs.Delivery suite is the acute area where doctors need to be and if they’re busy, getting reviews for CTGs when we’re downstairs can take a long time and can mean that our waiting times are longer. Now, we can get doctors to review our CTGs, away from the day unit, and give us verbal plans over the phone, which has meant that the flow between patients in the day unit has become much easier.”

Giving midwives extra time to give more care to mothers and their babies.

The latest add on to Guardian is a central station electronic chalkboard, called the SaFERR Birth Board. This stands for Situation and Features, Evaluation, Risks and Requirements. This is a risk management tool which summarises the important information for all women on the labour wards, both high risk and low risk. A major feature in reducing incidences of avoidable, poor outcomes.

So Guardian is the communicator. It facilitates a structured teamwork approach to care, with appropriate senior staff oversight. Guardian has its foundation, in MRC funded research and has been designed to mitigate risk and reduce human errors. Guardian is a technology to improve care, for mothers and their babies.

Learn more about INFANT-Guardian and how it could help your organisation save time, money and lives.