New CTG monitoring equipment enables pregnant women with complications such as pre-eclampsia or preterm prelabour rupture of membranes to stay in their own home instead of being hospitalised or attending frequent check-ups. A collaboration across all five Danish regions ensures equal healthcare services for all and better options for individualised treatment through the joint procurement of CTG monitoring devices across Denmark.
New monitoring equipment enables pregnant women with complications to stay in their own home instead of being hospitalised
Pregnant women with complications such as pre-eclampsia or preterm prelabour rupture of membranes need strong monitoring to survey the state of health for both mother and child. With the use of new telehealth equipment, pregnant women can avoid multiple weekly check-ups at the hospital. A collaboration across all five Danish regions ensures equal healthcare services for all. A Dutch supplier has won the tender and will be providing the equipment.
CTG measurements, i.e. measuring the heartbeat of mother and fetus, are very important when it comes to pregnancy complications. In the late summer of 2019 a cross-regional collaboration was initiated with the purpose of procuring new CTG devices suitable for home monitoring, because a previous supplier had stopped manufacturing a similar device. The result is that the Dutch supplier, Nemo Healthcare, has won the tender and will be providing CTG home monitoring equipment for all five regions in Denmark. The Health Innovation Centre of Southern Denmark was responsible for the national tender process.
Peaceful Admission – at Home
Home monitoring is made possible through a portable CTG device, which the woman brings home. She can use it to take CTG measurements of the baby’s and her own heartbeat and send the measurements directly to the hospital via a connected iPad. This means that she can stay home instead of going to the hospital for extra check-ups.
Head of Midwifery at Lillebaelt Hospital in Southern Denmar, Anne Uller, is looking forward to being able to add CTG home monitoring to their current home monitoring options for blood pressure and urine:
– The idea is that you can be hospitalized peacefully in your own home. With this new equipment, we improve our ability to ensure that mother and baby are doing well. This is highly relevant in an era when we would like to be more digital while at the same time strengthening individualised treatment. Home monitoring of pregnant women is an obvious opportunity because the target group has strong digital skills.
Strong Collaboration across the Country
The potential for home monitoring of pregnant women is very large. Professor Olav Bennike Bjørn Petersen is the leading expert in Denmark when it comes to research in home monitoring of pregnant women, from his time at the Central Denmark region, where they have data from home monitoring of over 400 pregnant women. He now works at the Institute for Clinical Medicine at Rigshospitalet:
– I am glad that we will have access to this home monitoring equipment developed by an innovative Dutch company, which masters the challenging art of monitoring the baby’s heartbeat and are far ahead when it comes to new ideas. It is our hope that this new equipment can also be used for twins and fetuses with an irregular heartbeat and potentially women at risk of premature labour
Olav Bennike Bjørn Petersen is happy that doctors, midwives, medical engineers and IT specialists in all five regions have collaborated in selecting the best solutions:
– We can achieve so much when we work together ans share our experiences, and the pregnant women’s experiences, with the equipment across regions.
Denmark is a first mover when it comes to home monitoring
Denmark is at the forefront when it comes to home monitoring of pregnant women through CTG equipment, which is not very widespread in Europe yet. After a long tender process, delayed by the corona situation, the winner of the tender is the Dutch company Nemo Healthcare. Their CEO, Michael Manuel, looks forward to the collaboration with the Danish midwives and obstetricians:
– We have been working for more than 10 years on developing fetal monitoring systems that combine quality with comfort for mother and child, and have flexible use cases. Our systems enable monitoring of mother and fetus both at the hospital and at home. I am very proud of our technology, our innovation drive and the quality of our team, which has been acknowledged by all five regions in Denmark by the choice of Nemo Healthcare as preferred supplier for CTG home monitoring.
The use of the new device for home monitoring will be implemented in the Fall of 2021 and the service will be available for all maternity wards in the Region of Southern Denmark.
