Artificial intelligence has become commonplace technology in many aspects of our day-to-day living. Now it has found its way into the labor and delivery suites, proving itself a trustworthy partner in the fetal monitoring arena.
Now live in all our SoCal ministries, Vigilance is a software program that pairs with our current fetal monitoring system. It continuously analyzes the mother’s and baby’s information to monitor the fetal heart rate pattern and labor progress. The software color codes the fetal heart rate patterns, prioritizing them so those patients at risk (orange/red category) are easily identified, and those with normal patterns (green/blue) are at the bottom. If an L&D unit is at capacity, clinicians will know that a patient at risk will be easy to identify because the AI “triages” them based on level of risk.
Vigilance is embedded in Epic to make individual patient analysis quick and convenient for providers. In addition to providing visualization of the fetal heart rate strip, it also allows the clinician to look for developing trends and compare with the labor progress by switching from 4-hour to 12-hour views. That color is the equivalent of your partner tapping you on the shoulder saying “hey, you might want to look a little closer at this section.” The software doesn’t replace the physician, midwife or nurse interpretation but becomes an excellent tool to aid in their analysis.
Below is an example of an at-risk patient.
