CRANBURY, NJ--(Marketwired - Jan 30, 2014) - Continuing its commitment to deliver safe, quality health outcomes to the Labor and Delivery (L&D) patients of southwest rural Iowa, Greater Regional Medical Center (GRMC), a modernized 25-bed Critical Access Hospital (CAH) in Creston, has implemented PeriGen's PeriCALM® fetal surveillance system. GRMC deployed PeriCALM in its regional birthing center less than 90 days from contract signing.

"With PeriGen's PeriCALM, the evidence-based decision support system is like having a maternal fetal expert looking over your shoulder throughout the labor process, offering reassurance and consultation when needed," said Gwen Buck, R.N., GRMC's chief nursing officer. "When we get busy handling multiple deliveries, PeriCALM's fetal heart monitoring and alert capabilities ensure that we stay on top of all developments. We expect our outstanding quality care for newborns and their mothers to continue and PeriCALM helps assure the highest level of safety."

With PeriCALM's remote web access, GRMC physicians on-call can log onto the system's spilt screen to instantly view the mother and baby's fetal heart tracings in current state and over two hours. They can also access automated, real-time pattern recognition at the bedside. These capabilities allow physicians working remotely to see for themselves the same PeriCALM annotations nurses are seeing, creating more productive conversations. This dialogue empowers the obstetrics (OB) team to make decisions with greater confidence, mitigating the potential for complications and risk.

Together with OB specialists, family practice physicians and midwives, the GRMC perinatal care team typically delivers between 150 and 250 babies annually.

"PeriGen supports Greater Regional Medical Center's mission to provide the highest quality healthcare and service and to be our community's provider of choice," said Buck. "PeriCALM technology also helps us support our core values by encouraging teamwork in making it easier for physicians, nurses and midwives to view and interpret the same fetal strip data at the same time and collaborate on the patient's care."

Continuing, she added, "Above all, PeriCALM enhances our integrity and compassion by applying evidence-based decision support annotations to promote better outcomes -- all of which demonstrates our striving for best practice, excellence and the respect we have for our patients. This ensures we're delivering the very best care."

Future plans call for PeriCALM to interface with GRMC's enterprise-wide electronic health record (EHR) from Computer Programs and Systems, Inc. (CPSI). The interfaced systems will replace the paper-based L&D patient medical records currently scanned into the CPSI EHR application by capturing and incorporating that data electronically and seamlessly into one record.

"PeriCALM gives our OB staff a sense of reliability and security in the decision process by creating better communication between physicians, nurses and midwives," said Denise Riley, R.N., OB/GYN coordinator at GRMC. "It ensures we're able to maintain the high quality level we've established, and that our interpretation of the data is following evidence-based best practices."

"Greater Regional Medical Center has established an outstanding reputation for its quality of care and dedication to achieving positive outcomes for its patient community spread across rural southwestern Iowa," said Matthew Sappern, PeriGen's CEO. "We are excited to bring our sophisticated PeriCALM complete perinatal system to grow with their technology needs now and into the future."

About Greater Regional Medical Center
 Greater Regional Medical Center (GRMC) is a state-of-the-art, modern healthcare facility, with an Intensive Care Unit, Greater Regional Birthing Center, Greater Regional Surgery Center, Greater Regional Cancer Center, and a 24 hour Emergency Services. Located in Creston, Iowa, the 25-bed Critical Access Hospital serves the healthcare needs of residents of rural southwest and south central Iowa, with a mission to provide the highest quality healthcare and service, and a vision to be the healthcare provider and employer of choice. It is part of the Unity Point Health System. For more information, please visit http://www.greaterregional.org/.

About PeriGen, Inc.
 PeriGen, Inc., is an innovative provider of fetal surveillance systems employing patented, pattern-recognition and obstetrics technologies that empower perinatal clinicians to make confident, real-time decisions about the mothers and babies in their care. PeriGen's customer-centric team of clinicians and technologists builds the most advanced systems available to augment obstetric decision-making and improve communications among the clinical team at the point of care, while supporting data flow between healthcare IT systems. PeriGen is a KLAS® recognized leader in the obstetrics/perinatal space is offers the only EFM pattern recognition system that is validated by the NICHD. For more information, please visit us at www.PeriGen.com.