Keeping Statistics for your Midwife Business

Keeping Statistics for your Midwife Business. Being a midwife of a successful practice is hard work. There is so much time spent taking phone calls, seeing patients, processing insurance claims, marketing your brand, creating policies, and employee meetings. Last thing midwives think about are data collection. Taking the time to look through charts and collect information to show your outcomes is so important when starting a new practice. Show your team what amazing work is being done at the practice. Brag about your statistics to the local paper, collaborating doctors and hospital, potential clients on your Facebook page, and more. American College of Nurse Midwives (ACNM) has a yearly submission data base for midwifery practices.

My little tiny birth center ranked toward the top with nationally recognized midwifery practices. We had minimal interventions, postpartum hemorrhages, or complications. This national award on many different levels was huge bragging rights when resistance occurs about “how safe is a midwife.” Even though my birth center practice closed couple years ago. The safety statistics are still helping change laws in our state to regulate birth centers and have more options available for women. Don’t underestimate the power of your great care. Data and numbers will shine through to what is being accomplished with your midwife business.

Spend the time collecting that data. If you have the additional funds, pay staff to pull that data from your records. Train them to know what to look for. More details, the better about outcomes to help researcher understand correlations with data and outcomes.

It is helpful to know that only your first time mothers are having trouble with breastfeeding and not lasting past six weeks postpartum. It is great to know what position women are birthing in. There may be a correlation with decreased tears and water births (I know I saw that connection).

Statistics are powerful tools to keep up with. Birth Tracks is a great system to use and ACNM can pull your practice’s data when annual voluntary submission is requested. As our popularity and demands increase, it is even more important to keep track of your amazing outcomes. I loved to brag that 99.9% of my ladies were still breastfeeding at the six week postpartum visit. Let me know any other hospital based practice that had those statistics! Midwives always have a hard time promoting themselves. We want to help families and don’t realize showing off our amazing skills will only help the greater community and its future babies.