Transforming Infertility and Pregnancy Support with Digital Tools

The stress on health care systems is increasing and there is a need to find smarter ways for taking care of patients. Pandemic has increased the burden as traditional ways for accessing care have been limited. According to our experiences building the digital platform has helped us to facilitate illness prevention and care coordination. The most significant potential has been however in the early intervention. Providing a low threshold for access and a more efficient way for tackling health concerns are the keys to transforming the way we can provide high-quality health care in the future.

We have gained promising feedback by empowering women with digital support. Women face situations that might be worrying including difficulties related to getting pregnant and on the other hand unfamiliar symptoms and concerns related to pregnancy. The Web is getting increasingly popular for searching information. This is providing information overflood and might jeopardize patient safety at worst. The feedback from patients and care personnel has been positive in supporting for example infertility treatment patients. Key elements have been the provision of relevant personalized information of their treatment in a timely manner, reminders of medication and actions, transparency of a woman’s progress and symptoms to the care personnel and low threshold connection to the care personnel.

The leading Swiss healthcare provider Hirslanden is a pioneering example in launching a digitally supported pregnancy journey to facilitate the care coordination of pregnant ladies and give them low threshold access to relevant information, reminders, and access to healthcare professionals for any concerns. Midwives can follow up on the symptoms and progress reported by women. Digital support throughout the pregnancy journey is foreseen to help the Swiss ladies who have suffered from diminishing amount of pregnancy support and services available as live interactions have decreased due to the pandemic. By engaging with the ladies from early on in their pregnancy journey helps to reduce stress, anxiety and prevent potential complications along the way.

Building the digital support for patient journeys such as infertility treatments and pregnancy builds on top of quality focus and patient safety culture. Professionals act based on structured guidelines and platform helps them to support patient safety. By incorporating patient self-reported data and device data with full transparency to the care team and a low threshold for the patient to be in touch we can facilitate better outcomes. On an organizational level, it has also enabled us to develop reporting on aggregated data for quality monitoring and improvement. All in all, we have experienced that digitally enabled patient journeys provide patients a fundamentally different safety net around their health compared to self-help and self-coordinated care with the traditional way.