By Lonye Rasch
Delivering Hope
At the new Rady Mother and Child Center at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus, the goal is to provide a personalized delivery with the help of empathic, compassionate and skillful midwives.
From the moment a maternity patient arrives, her journey is eased as she is driven directly to the Rady Center’s entrance. When the midwives greet each woman, their focus is to keep her calm and to provide a positive maternity experience, says head midwife Elisheva Levine, who has eight children of her own. “We talk with the women about their vision for the delivery and their baby’s birth,” she adds.
The delivery rooms envelop the expectant mother in an atmosphere of serenity. To help the woman relax, there is a deep bathtub-sized pool for her private use.
At the Rady Center, midwives perform 90 percent of the deliveries, Levine says. If the woman has had a high-risk pregnancy, she notes, the physicians are more involved. At Hadassah Mt. Scopus, Levine reports, only 13 percent of the maternity patients undergo a cesarean section, which, she adds, “is far lower than Israel’s national rate.”
Senior obstetrician/gynecologist Dr. Yishai Sompolinsky is working on an artificial intelligence (AI) model to enhance a woman’s birth experience further. AI, he says, “mines the data from her electronic record, capturing the dynamic process of her labor. It analyzes her metrics, such as blood pressure and pulse, against other women’s labor data to determine the best protocol for her. “AI can’t replace a nurse or physician in the delivery room,” he says. “It is not for decision-making, but it can aid in decision-making.”
Through retrospective analysis, Dr. Sompolinsky and his colleagues have shown that AI models can produce accurate results. He predicts that within the next few years, AI models will be operational. Thanks to the big data acquired throughout the delivery, physicians will be able to incorporate their colleagues’ experience — including successes and errors in the labor and delivery rooms. AI will personalize the probability of a woman needing a C-section, for example, enabling physicians to reassure her if the probability is low.
On a humorous note, Dr. Sompolinsky relates that employees in China, misunderstanding the stated purpose of the AI model, have validated his model by using it successfully to estimate the time needed for delivering packages!
Learn More
Read how Hadassah Doctors Treat Rare Condition in Newborn That Saves Her Ovaries.
Listen to this episode of Hadassah On Call: This Israeli Midwife Believes Her Job is Her Calling.