Following a Pregnancy Across Clinics
Sector: Regional health services, primary care and maternity
The scenario
A pregnancy is followed by many hands: a community health worker, a rural clinic, an ultrasound center in the nearest town, a hospital for delivery. Every stop records what it sees, and every stop keeps its own file.
Imagine a mother who develops high blood pressure late in her pregnancy. The reading was taken at a small clinic and written on a paper card. When she reaches the hospital, the earlier readings, the ultrasound findings and a complication from a previous pregnancy aren't with her, and the team starts nearly from scratch when hours matter.
What goes wrong without the right tool
- Nobody has a single, shared view of the pregnancy.
- Warning signs across visits (a rising blood pressure, a missed appointment, a previous complication) aren't watched by anything.
- Tests are duplicated because nobody knows they were done.
- After birth the baby's first checks and vaccinations end up in a different file from the mother's.
How Atomik can be used
- Define the pregnancy record once. Visits, blood pressure, weight, lab results, ultrasounds, risk factors, delivery and newborn checks, as openEHR templates.
- Let every place contribute. Clinics of any size send what they record to a shared repository through the REST API or an integration layer. Clinics with weak connectivity need client software on their side that stores data and sends it when a connection is available; that is part of the client application, not of Atomik.
- One identity per mother. She has a demographic record linked to her EHR, and the baby's record can be linked to hers as a relationship. The Master Patient Index capabilities help when the same mother was registered more than once.
- Turn warning signs into stored queries. For example "blood pressure above the threshold at two visits", "no visit in the last six weeks" and "previous complication recorded", which the clinical team creates and adjusts in the Query Builder.
- Produce the work list. Your application runs the queries and shows community health workers the mothers who need a call or a visit.
- See the coverage. Population queries answer questions such as prenatal care coverage by district.
What this gives you
One record that travels with the mother instead of staying at the clinic, warning rules the clinical team owns, and a picture of where visits are being missed.
Why Atomik fits
This is a problem of continuity: one person, many places, over months. Atomik keeps the record with the person and not with the clinic, lets each place contribute with the same structure, and lets clinicians define the warning signs and change them as guidelines evolve.