May Birth Data News

                                                                                                                          May 2014

Birth Data News

Excellence in Birth Registration Conference Recap

The seventh annual Excellence in Birth Registration Conference and Training was held Thursday, May 1, 2014. More than 150 birth registrars, supervisors, midwives, and other interested staff celebrated Minnesota’s improved birth registration practices and learned how this work impacts lives.  The training conference is an opportunity to mark our progress; gain information and insights; strengthen and establish professional relationships; and help each other file correct, timely and accurate birth records for the benefit of Minnesota families, and your facility, as well as local and national public health.

This year, the Office of Vital Records (OVR) recognized 57 hospitals with our Excellence in Birth Registration awards, discussed improvements and welcomed our new state registrar, Molly Crawford.

When the Excellence program was developed in 2007, only 63% of Minnesota birth records were filed within five days. Another prevalent issue at that time was the existence of so many records that contained “unknown” responses. In fact, we were over tolerance on 14 data fields. Through education, monitoring and recognition, Minnesota birth registrations have improved, both in timeliness and accuracy. In 2013, 98 percent of birth records filed at the hospital were filed on time and Minnesota successfully met national parameters for all data.

We can all be proud of these achievements, which are even greater than they initially seem. Consider that we also implemented a new birth registration system (MR&C), and expanded the birth data set during these past seven years. All these successes are the direct result of the hard work and dedication of our birth registrars!

In an effort to encourage new birth registrars to attend, OVR offered a limited number of free conference registrations for first-timers. We were happy to welcome many new faces. Thank you all for participating. We sincerely hope you found the day to be informative, encouraging and helpful. For everyone who attended, thank you for completing the evaluation at the end of the conference.

If you didn't get a chance to evaluate the event, please send us an email with your feedback and ideas for future training events.

Topics covered at the 2014 Conference:

  • Birth Defects Monitoring
  • Birth Registration Basics
  • Corrections to Birth Records
  • Cultural Diversity
  • eVital Records Project
  • Fetal Death Reports
  • "Hard stop" Question
  • Health Disparities
  • Newborn Screening
  • Paternity Establishment
  • Perinatal Hepititis B

All handouts and presentations are posted online at the OVR website:

http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/chs/osr/birthreg/

From all of us in the Office of Vital Records, thank you for making the 2014 conference a success and a wonderful celebration of our good work in Minnesota. Thanks also goes to those unable to attend the conference because they covered for someone from their facility so another could attend. We hope you had a great day.