Smoking in pregnancy remains a key public health concern and is the single biggest risk factor for adverse outcomes in pregnancy, including complications during labour, increased risk of miscarriage, premature birth, low birth weight and stillbirth.

The Greater Manchester Smokefree Pregnancy Programme has been supporting pregnant smokers to quit and increase the number of babies born smokefree since 2018.
During the COVID-19 pandemic it has been essential to continue to identify pregnant smokers and to support them to quit, particularly as pregnant women were placed in a high risk category and encouraged to shield at the start of the outbreak.

Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) has worked with Greater Manchester Health and Social Care (GMHSC) Partnership to develop a digital platform to support specialist midwives working on the programme to continue engagement online and to digitally track the progress of the women receiving quit support.

The platform digitises the pathway with the aim of reducing the amount of time spent inputting and collating data, creating more time for midwives to provide care. It is being used across Greater Manchester to enable the programme to standardise the collection of data, see the impact of the programme and identify opportunities to make improvements.

Pregnant women on the pathway have also been provided with carbon monoxide monitors which link to smartphones and allow them to complete screenings at home, rather than attending a clinic in person, with their readings being fed back to the specialist midwives to track their quit journey.

The digital platform also allows midwives to send motivational text messages and appointment reminders to support women on their quit journey. Pregnant smokers are also provided with specialist support to help them quit, including free nicotine replacement therapy to help them deal with cravings.

A visual dashboard also provides daily information to specialist advisors and their managers to proactively manage the service and clearly show outcomes for the GM system at provider, locality and regional footprint.

The platform has been developed in partnership with digital transformation specialists company Objectivity Ltd. Objectivity used Mendix low-code platform as speed to market to get the application developed during pandemic as there was high risk for pregnant smokers from COVID-19

Traditional software development approach would take long time. Capturing end users experience using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic by Mendix was a perfect solution.

Collaborative approach to develop the application working closely with HInM, Product Owners from GMHSCP and Smoking Cessation midwives accelerated complete software development which resulted in a very robust product.