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Baby Birth Certificates Go Digital At Tampa Hospitals

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By RICHARD MULLINS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 8, 2008

TAMPA - Some of the Tampa area's largest hospitals are starting to modernize one of the most meaningful and important milestones in a baby's life: getting a birth certificate.

St. Joseph's Women's Hospital and others are starting to use a new portable computer system to generate a birth certificate in the mother's hospital room – dramatically speeding up a vital, but sometimes cumbersome, bureaucratic process.

The system works this way. The day after a birth, hospital staff roll a special computer into a new mom's room and type out the baby's name, the names of the parents and other key information.

Parents can preview all the information on a display screen – showing exactly what the birth certificate will look like, preventing errors such as a misspelled name. Moms then sign the form on a digital touchpad, similar to those used at retail checkout lanes.

The system can also automatically generate a Social Security number, a key piece of information for parents adding new children to health insurance plans. In minutes, parents can pick up the birth certificate at a special printer in the hospital building.

"This was very easy, just like signing your name at a checkout at Wal-Mart or Target," said Paresh Sangani, whose son Krish was born at St. Joseph's last week.

Previously, that whole process could take a week or more as clerks interpreted handwritten forms and entered information into a state database. A week after leaving the hospital, parents had to drive back and pick up the birth certificate – accurate or not. Any changes meant another waiting period.

St. Joseph's started using the new system this summer. Tampa General Hospital plans on starting its version of the system in February, and University Community Hospital will likely start using it as well.

Technically, the system is owned and run by Florida's Department of Health, Office of Vital Statistics, which is deploying it as part of a broad modernization project – eventually bringing instant birth certificates to hospitals across the state.

"One big benefit is parents feel more confident everything is accurate and that they're certificates are real and their kids will be ensured by their health insurance," said Julie Utley, a health information technician at St. Joseph's. "For us, this is about customer service."

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919.

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