Midwifery Care Communities Trust OnPage
This article examines the continued widespread adoption and implementation of OnPage’s industry-leading CC&C system by midwifery care communities.
What Are Midwifery Care Communities?
Midwifery care communities consist of specialized healthcare professionals known as midwives. Midwives work in multidisciplinary teams in hospitals and community healthcare settings to improve the maternal and neonatal health of women.
Midwives introduce women to the healthcare system and ensure that their babies receive ongoing, skilled care during pregnancy, childbirth and in the important days and weeks after birth. Midwives also provide advice, care and support for women during pregnancy, labor and the early postnatal period.
What Midwives Had to Say About Using the OnPage System
Practice Administrator, Esraa Dhaif
Esraa Dhaif, practice administrator of the Midwifery Collective of Ottawa, uses OnPage’s CC&C on-call scheduling and failover capabilities to manage 13 midwives effectively. Dhaif also oversees the entire midwifery team through OnPage’s web-based enterprise dashboard.
Several clients are being juggled at the clinic weekly, and each one needs to be assured of instant, 24/7 communication with their midwives. If a client is having pregnancy issues or going into labor, OnPage priority messaging gets through to a midwife that can assist the patient immediately.
Midwifery Collective of Ottawa’s clients email the page/alert or call the OnPage toll-free number with their midwife’s OnPage ID (OPID). The organization has set up an OnPage escalation policy to ensure that alerts are always received by the right midwife during afterhours.
The OnPage team spoke with Dhaif to learn about the critical communication challenges that she experiences daily. The following interview details the day-to-day experiences of a practice administrator that uses OnPage to manage a group of midwives.
OnPage: How did you hear about us?
Dhaif: “An Ottawa hospital that is using OnPage recommended that we try it out. We downloaded the free trial and experienced the system firsthand. After additional research and experimentation, we decided that OnPage was what we were looking for.”
OnPage: Tell us why priority alerts are important to your business.
Dhaif: “Our clients never have to wait to hear back from one of our midwives. There is an escalation list of the on-call midwives entered in the [OnPage] enterprise dashboard, so we are confident that every client will hear from someone right away. No matter who is off that day, OnPage goes straight down the list of names available until someone gets the page and responds.
“We use the OnPage messaging system every day, 24/7, and it has made our job easier and less stressful. The midwives like the fact that all the paging is on their phones, and they don’t have to carry another device. Their old-style pagers were unreliable and not getting the job done. They were happy to stop using them and update to the latest messaging technology.”
Cheryl Anderson Heitkamp. Cheryl belongs to an active midwives group that attempted to use Google Voice phones for messaging and it didn’t work out at all.
OnPage: How would you characterize your day-to-day operations?
Heitkamp: “Midwives have unpredictable schedules. We needed a system like OnPage to make sure our messages were getting to the right person every time. Our clients are confident that they can get in touch with us quickly, which is a big bonus. The hospital that we are involved with can connect with us directly using OnPage without any monitoring once it was set up.”
OnPage: What did you like about our product?
Heitkamp: “We needed a smartphone-based app with a loud, can’t miss alert. We also required the priority messaging system to be easy to deploy. OnPage was completely compatible with every specification and feature we needed. Besides the real-time alerting and on-call scheduling features, we are now HIPAA messaging compliant. HIPAA compliance was a must and OnPage provided that.”
OnPage: How did the OnPage application make your job easier?
Heitkamp: “OnPage is involved every time we communicate with the hospital, and it’s also the preferred way we can reliably communicate with each other. OnPage has the critical alert sound that always gets through. We are very satisfied with OnPage. We use it daily and it works all the time. It has made a big difference!”
Conclusion
Real-time, secure communication between midwives and their clients plays a crucial role in prenatal care. OnPage provides a complete CC&C system to facilitate the communication between the two parties and ensure that mothers have a stress-free childbirth experience.
