MyPregn@ncy: a personal health community for the pregnant woman.

Previous use of web-based applications that involve both care clients and care providers show positive effects on both aforementioned issues. Therefore, the proposed project introduces an online, individual, secured personal health community (PHC) for the pregnant women who enters maternity care, referred to as MyPregn@ncy. The study will provide evidence about the effectiveness of offering MyPregn@ncy on the quality of maternal care and the collaboration of maternal care professionals.

MyPregn@ncy is an innovative intervention, with which we strive to a revolution in the organisation of perinatal and maternal care. Key-issues are active participation, engagement and risk-management of the pregnant woman in the care for herself and her baby, and better collaboration within all involved care professionals during pregnancy, birth and postnatal period. We strongly expect that, by changing these issues, the quality and medical outcomes of Dutch maternal care will improve.

- Pre measurement (baseline)

- Because the intervention is implemented in a stepped-wedge design, measaurements are performed in each step, ie. 4 steps (Apr 2014, Aug 2014, Dec 2014 and Apr 2015).

The intervention is the active offering of MyPregn@ncy, an online, individual, secured personal health community (PHC). It has various functionalities through which the pregnant woman can share her personal, (medical) information with other members of her PHC. Beside care providers, she can invite her partner, a family member or a close friend. In order to support the pregnant woman in realizing and processing her own maternal care period, several medical applications will be available for her, such as risk profiling questionnaires for the development of preeclampsia or depression. Easy accessible communication tools encourage sharing of information and involving of all professional disciplines when feedback or interference is desired or needed.