Since 1994, the AUDIPOG Sentinel Network is composed of a whole of public and private voluntary maternity units from all over France, using or not an AUDIPOG computerized obstetrical file.
The goals of the Sentinel Network, defined during its creation were :
- to control, year after year, the perinatal health indicators (indicators of the patient's profile, practices and results), pooling the data from the files of the maternity units that participate in the network ;
- to provide the maternity units with a tool to value their practices and results, comparing the results of their own file tests to those of the sentinel maternity units network ;
- to set up multicenter studies, by request of one or several members of the network.
The Sentinel Network partners are :
- public and private maternity units (collection and capture of data, participation in the creation of a centralised database) ;
- the AUDIPOG association and the network coordination cell (definition of goals, communication with maternity units, reading, quality controls and pooling of data, analysis of the centralised file, distribution of results to the members of the Network).
In 1995, the CNIL (Commission Nationale Informatique et Liberté - French Computer and Freedom Committee approved the Sentinel Network (statement no 374982).
A charter governs the relationship between the members of the maternity units sentinel network, the coordination cell and the people who want to use the common database.
Moreover two committees ave been created to deal with requests entering the centralised file, with all kinds of cooperative works or scientific publications (apart from standard tests carried out every year) :
- the scientific committee whose function is to evaluate the scientific quality of drafts,
- the committee of ethics that control the acceptability of the drafts deontologically speaking and whether or not they respect the interests of each member.