The ACNM Benchmarking Project is a quality project where practices annually submit data on midwife attended births and patient care. It is a national quality project that pools the data based on region and practice size to allow us to have evidence of the outcomes of midwife lead care as well as compare our outcomes to similar practices to improve quality.
6 required elements are:
- Total vaginal births
- Number of primary c/s
- Number of repeat c/s
- Number of CNM/CM FTEs
- Practice name and address
- Contact name, phone number, email
More information can be found here.
Data is typically submitted in March for the prior year and then the benchmarking project reviews the results and identifies best practices for a specific quality measure. Best practices and results are identified here.
Katie Page, CNM, FACNM has been collecting her practices’ benchmark data for the past four years and wanted to share the spreadsheet that she uses so that submission is easy at the end of the year. Benchmarking is helpful for practices to “prove their worth” to institutions, payers, and legislators. And supports the awesome outcomes of midwife care!! There are several other tools that other practices use, too, like birthtracks.
Katie is happy to chat with anyone who would like more info, or to make more sense of the spreadsheet, if needed. Practices do NOT have to collect all of the data to be included in Benchmarking.
Katie Page, CNM
Kapage@live.com
Lynchburg, VA