AHA and Epic Collaborate to Build Toolset to Detect and Treat Postpartum Hemorrhage

The AHA and healthcare technology company Epic are “collaborating to help more hospitals consider adopting a set of tools to aid in the detection and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage (PPH).”

PPH is responsible for “11% of maternal deaths in the U.S. and notably 40% of all such hemorrhages occur in patients without any risk factors. Point-of-care tools in the [EHR] can help healthcare providers prevent, detect, and treat PPH.” The PPH toolkit, now available to users of Epic’s Stork Obstetrics Information System, “includes methods of assessing a mother’s risk of hemorrhage, a mechanism to continuously refresh risk assessments throughout the childbirth and postpartum period, embedded guides to support clinical decision-making within clearly defined risk categories, and facilitate treatment of an acute hemorrhage, all within a clinician’s obstetric workflow.”

The collaboration brings together “experts from Epic’s customer community and the AHA Patient Safety Initiative to increase awareness of the toolkit.” Two health systems have already begun to implement the postpartum risk assessment tool. Baptist Health in Arkansas, which delivers around 6,800 babies yearly, now uses the tool, and WakeMed Health & Hospitals in Raleigh, North Carolina now uses the “postpartum risk assessment tool, a maternal emergency narrator, and quantitative blood loss calculator in the health system’s EHR. [It] has seen a consistent decrease in obstetric hemorrhage rates since 2022.”