NEW PUBLICLY REPORTED CNM STATISTIC/BIRTH CERTIFICATE ACCURACY

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Starting in June 2019, the "Percent Deliveries by CNMs" at your facility will begin to be publicly reported to CalHospitalCompare.org !!

This data will come directly from the birth certificate. Is your hospital accurately reporting CNMs as the delivering provider on the birth certificate?

If your hospital is a member of the CMQCC Maternal Data Center (MDC), we are inviting all interested CNMs, especially CNM leads and CNMs who currently use the MDC at their facility, to an informational webinar on this new publicly reportable CNM statistic. This webinar will be Wednesday January 16th from 12-1:30pm PST. Registration is required here: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q_Z67_HOQP6q7nAUSoUnpA (note that the first 20 minutes will include non-CNM related topics as this is an MDC update webinar; please remain on the call to hear about the CNM statistic).

On November 29th, your hospital (if it is a CMQCC member) received notification of this new statistic called "Percent Deliveries by Certified Nurse-Midwives" to be reported on CalHospitalCompare.org. This statistic is designed to inform consumer choice and not as a performance metric. The intent is to support women who have a personal preference to be attended by a CNM. Reporting this statistic to CalHospitalCompare.org will help women more easily identify their hospital choices that have a CNM presence. You can read an excerpt from the informational email sent to your facility here.

Because this statistic will be publicly reported, it is more important than ever to ensure the accuracy of the "delivering provider" information entered by the birth certificate clerk at your facility. That's why this webinar is so important! You'll be able to learn how to get into the MDC and find the CNM statistic in order to compare your own CNM birth records against what CMQCC will be publicly reporting. If any major discrepancies are noted between your birth log and what is in the MDC, this tool allows you to correct/change the information directly in the MDC before it is reported. Although this will not retrospectively change any birth certificates that incorrectly reported the delivering provider, it will help ensure that what the consumer sees on CalHospitalCompare.org is an accurate reflection of the proportion of CNM births at your facility. The ability to use this tool in the MDC as an easier audit of your facility's birth certificate accuracy is particularly timely, as we are hearing from many CNMs that the delivering provider at their facilities are often logged incorrectly.

It is our hope that if the audit of "percentage of CNM births" at your facility is not accurate, that this tool can provide you with information at your fingertips to bring to your managers, department chairs, and birth records clerks in order to help your department design new processes to accurately capture CNM births at your facility in the future. Commencing with this first informational webinar, CNMA will continue to work with CMQCC on future webinars if more in depth training is needed. CNMA is also here to help you better audit your birth certificate accuracy if you are just now starting this process. Birth certificate accuracy can have major policy implications if CNM births are being underreported.

In the November newsletter, we noted that every practice should start by doing the following:

Check with your hospital or facility for their policy for listing the delivering provider on the birth certificate. This is usually as easy as calling the birth certificate office and asking the secretary or recorder how they identify the delivering provider.

Pay special attention for those of you using electronic medical records, there is often a specific place where the "delivering provider" needs to be recorded. If this is blank, it will often default to the attending physician.

It may be that your facility's policy is to list the attending physician for billing reasons. WE NEED TO KNOW if this is happening. Write a letter to your hospital administration. If you'd like a template letter , please email us at advocacy@cnma.org.

We are thrilled that we have a chance to accurately reflect the proportion of hospital births by CNMs for all of California! Please join the CMQCC webinar on Wednesday December 16th!

If you have questions please email hollyMsmith77@gmail.com