At the start of 2020, Indiana University Health formed a partnership with Babyscripts to deliver Virtual Maternity Care to the 9,000+ mothers and babies that receive pregnancy care through their hospitals every year. Known for their cutting-edge approach to medicine and treatment options, the six-hospital system and largest network of physicians in the state of Indiana prepared for a slow roll out, eventually planning to offer both the maternal digital education and maternal health monitoring layers of Babyscripts Virtual Maternity Care to all their pregnant patients.
Then the world went into lockdown.
As IU Health scrambled to adapt at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Babyscripts proved to be an essential part of their response. They implemented the solution in a radically shortened timeline, enrolling patients onto the Babyscripts myJourney app in a massive block at the start of lockdowns and at steadily high rates since that time.
Babyscripts myJourney enabled the IU Health team to standardize their prenatal education and deliver a consistent patient experience over their six different locations, a crucial benefit for the large health system.
We sat down with the team at IU Health at the close of 2020 to discuss more about their rollout of Babyscripts — how they got provider buy-in, how they used the app to keep patients engaged, and why they chose to use a digital solution for the women’s health service line.
To streamline OB education, IU Health runs content workshops in which stakeholders from different areas and practices work together to determine the content that should exist in the app. They work with data provided by Babyscripts to quantify patient satisfaction — to determine what information is missing from their content materials and how they can adapt to meet the needs of their patients.
They also use the myJourney app to reduce OB triage calls, analyzing the information that patients are calling about and adding content into the app to more efficiently address those concerns, and decrease strain on the care team.
The ability to add practice-specific information, virtual tours, and other resources directly in the app excited stakeholders to its possibilities both as a resource and a marketing tool, and it has proved extremely vital for their pandemic response. Over the course of the pandemic, the team at IU Health has used the myJourney app to deliver over 11 customized campaigns, to keep their patients up to date on changing policies and protocols through COVID, as well as other important info.
IU’s rollout of Babyscripts’ Maternal Health Monitoring followed close behind their deployment of the myJourney app, and enrollment has only increased as providers across the healthcare system realize the benefits of remote monitoring in a time of pandemic and beyond.
The team at IU Health is not an isolated group, but just one example of the many healthcare stakeholders that have recognized the long term benefits of enhancing in-person care with digital health solutions and implemented them at a system-wide level.
The pandemic may have accelerated its deployment, but the new hybrid model of care that IU Health is delivering to their pregnant patients through Babyscripts was becoming the standard before Covid. The critical shortage of OB/GYNs in the US, the outdated model of pregnancy care, and the increasing barriers to health equity posed by social determinants of health have combined to make the total transformation of pregnancy care a necessity in the here and now.
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