A Clinical Decision Support System for Maternity Risk Assessment Developed for NHS Scotland

Abstract

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is a growing field and the technology is increasingly used by both clinicians and patients. In maternity care, numerous guidelines exist on risk assessment and proposed care plans during pregnancy and labour. However, as new evidence arise, these guidelines are subject to change. It is time consuming for clinicians to a. Compile all this information and b. Keep it up to date. This paper presents our approach to overcoming these two issues: the SAFER (Safe Assessment Form to Evaluate Risk) maternity system. This CDS system contains rules extracted from current guidelines on maternity care and generates care plans at various stages of gestation based on patient data. The system includes a mobile application and a web interface. The mobile application can be used to visualise care plans and edit patient data. The web interface includes an authoring tool allowing clinicians to edit the logic used to generate the care plans, thus keeping the rules up to date. The tool has been developed for and is currently used by NHS Scotland.