Our Mission
Building information and knowledge to improve human health through innovative clinical research health informatics
How to request Perinatal Information for your project/study?
1. Download the Data Request Form for your project/study.
2. Complete the Data Request Form.
3. Send an email, with the completed form, to the Health Information Director
TO: Randall Blanco (randall_blanco@med.unc.edu)
SUBJECT: New Perinatal Information Request
** Please attach completed Data Request Form**
To download the Data Request Form for your project/study:
- for Quality Improvement (QI) or Process Improvement (PI) projects
use this link ==> Data Request Form for QI/PI - for Clinical Research studies
use this link ==> Data Request Form Research
Note: Please ensure that your project/study has IRB approval: UNC IRB
We developed and implemented a Perinatal Data Strategy to create perinatal integrated data sets that are used for quality improvement, process improvement, perinatal metrics, exploration of data insights, and clinical research.
The perinatal integrated data sets are sourced primarily from Epic@UNC perinatal data that is integrated with non-Epic data sets (ex: GIS, ACOG categorizations, perinatal tables for metric derivation, SDOH) and organized in different perinatal domains.
The integrated data sets are created with a structured and systematic methodology that provides data lineage, and integrated data sources from different domains can be linked to provide a longitudinal view of perinatal patients.
Currently we have a complete integrated data set for Deliveries, and our plan is to develop other perinatal domains that include prenatal, postpartum, lactation, NICU, ICU, diabetes, and hypertension.
We have three Perinatal Data Quality Nurses that work directly in Epic@UNC as follows:
- Review, and correct – if needed, all the deliveries at the UNC Medical-Center to verify that values of discrete fields on Epic@UNC’s Delivery Summary match with the values provided on the clinical notes of the medical record.
- Review, and correct – if needed, Epic@UNC’s OB-History for mothers that delivered at the UNC Medical-Center since Epic@UNC started (April 04, 2014).
- Create pregnancy episodes in Epic@UNC for women that plan to deliver at UNC Medical-Center but are not receiving prenatal care at UNC Medical-Center. This work is extremely important because it improves patient safety and patient care, but also provides information to the nurses and providers who care for women when they are in labor, as prenatal information is readily available in Epic@UNC (rather than in scans of faxed records).
- Review, and correct – if needed, core perinatal attributes at Epic@UNC perinatal medical records.
- Perform human abstraction on Epic@UNC perinatal medical records to obtain information that is not stored as specific discrete attributes on the medical record.
4. OB-CEF: Obstetrics Council of Epic Flows.
We lead a group of subject matter experts from maternity facilities across UNC Health, called OB-CEF, that gathers twice a month to discuss and decide on ways to streamline the Obstetric Perinatal Epic@UNC Hyperspace flows to improve clinical care and data quality within Epic@UNC perinatal medical records. OB-CEF improves data entry, standardizes attribute/field values, establishes data governance, eliminates redundancies, and promotes efficiencies (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things). OB-CEF has optimized the consistency and usefulness of obstetrical data entered across UNC Health.
5. Platform to generate and distribute Perinatal Metrics.
We provide a platform to obtain data, calculate, and report Perinatal Metrics – used not only to manage operations but also, as requested by NC Women’s Hospital Quality Group, to report metrics to third-party organizations (like PQCNC, Leapfrog, Joint Commission, and others).
We created a process to define and document the metric criteria, implement the methodology to obtain the metric, and publish and distribute the metrics using Tableau Data Sources and/or Tableau Server Dashboards.
6. OB-CODE: Obstetrics Council of Data Elements.
We lead a team of subject-matter experts to define perinatal metrics scope and criteria in the UNC Health System.
7. PRSC: Perinatal Research Service Center.
We lead the Perinatal Research Service Center, which allows for the curation and distribution of data for clinical research. PRSC is a crucial element to improve and promote CMIH and the Department of OB/GYN at UNC SOM as a research organization inside and outside UNC/UNC-Health.
8. Legacy data.
Clinical information of over 50,000 deliveries at the UNC Women’s Hospital were captured in the UNC Hospital Perinatal Database from 1996-2017. This data covers:
- Maternal medical and obstetric history
- Antepartum
- Labor, delivery and complications
- Puerperium
Data use agreement can be downloaded here.
