LaborLink Reduces Burnout for Obstetricians
Making Documentation Easier and Faster From Labor Onset to Childbirth
Across Northwestern Medicine, more than 20,000 babies are delivered every year. This means the health system provides inpatient obstetric care for about 15% of all births in Illinois each year.
With each patient’s labor progressing at different rates, and obstetricians balancing multiple clinical needs and tasks based upon urgency, timely and accurate documentation ensures the care team is aligned on each individual plan of care. However, it’s physically impossible for obstetricians to be at a bedside continuously during labor, and even if they could be, that would leave little opportunity to document the care being provided.
Clinicians are spending more time on clinical documentation, which is a major driver of clinician dissatisfaction and burnout.
To make documentation easier and faster for obstetricians, teams at Northwestern Medicine have created LaborLink, a novel software application that allows obstetricians to monitor fetal heartrate tracing (FHT) from their approved mobile devices anywhere — whether they’re in their office or elsewhere in the hospital.
On-the-Go Fetal Heartrate Tracing
FHT gives obstetricians insight into how the fetus is doing throughout the labor process.
However, the existing process for accessing FHT electronically is time-consuming and cumbersome. Additionally, clinicians must access the FHT and document it in different electronic platforms, making it burdensome for care teams to switch between the two.
“Computer access was slow and didn’t facilitate easy documentation,” says Amber N. Watters, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist who played a lead role in developing LaborLink. To solve this, Northwestern Medicine Research & Development and obstetricians collaborated to create LaborLink.
Computer access was slow and didn’t facilitate easy documentation.
Amber N. Watters, MD, Obstetrician-Gynecologist at Northwestern Medical Group
Figure 1: LaborLink allows seamless on-the-go access to critical information needed to determine how the fetus is doing throughout the labor process via mobile phone.
The LaborLink landing page is personalized for each obstetrician, sorting their current patients to the top of the page. Physicians can refresh the app within seconds, and it maintains the prior hour of data so obstetricians can easily evaluate the FHT over time (Figure 1). LaborLink makes it easy to switch from one patient’s FHT to the next, a task that an obstetrician performs repeatedly during labor management and that can be very frustrating in the existing process.
Anytime an obstetrician needs to write a note, they can do so in a form streamlined to collect only the most essential components via a push-button interface, while still providing space for the clinician to add their own free-text impressions, as needed. This documentation files to Epic within one minute, so all members of the clinical team can see them quickly. This keeps nurses, residents, midwives and physicians all on the same page when it comes to patient care.
Committing to a Better Physician Experience
In a survey of obstetricians’ experience with the current process of managing FHT in labor while not on the Labor and Delivery floor:
- 65.1% felt it was difficult or very difficult to access FHT.
- 69.8% felt it was difficult or very difficult to document FHT.
LaborLink improved workflows
75%
of users agree it has afforded them greater flexibility.
Not only did LaborLink improve workflows, 75% of users agree that it has afforded them greater flexibility. They can better assess when they are needed on the unit as well as manage tasks off the unit with less stress experienced.
This approach resulted in immediate and widespread use of the application, in contrast to many external technology solutions, which are often designed without end-user engagement and result in much smaller adoption by intended users.
Since implementation, obstetricians reported feeling less burned out. Additionally, this tool is another lever that speaks to the greater efforts being done by Northwestern Medicine to promote clinician wellbeing through the Office of Wellbeing.
Reshaping the Future With AI
AI is also expanding LaborLink’s capabilities. In January 2025, a notification workflow triggered by an AI model was added. It aimed to help with timely documentation by texting physicians’ reminders to complete their documentation.
LaborLink helps clinicians spend more time focusing on patient care and less time on administrative tasks such as navigating electronic interfaces or cumbersome documentation.
Discover other ways Northwestern Medicine is deploying AI to help physicians prioritize patient care.
