The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office on Women’s Health said more than 200 hospitals are participating in the HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative.
The work will occur through a contract with Premier, an organization that provides group purchasing, consulting and technology services to hospitals and health systems.
The new network is focused on improving maternal and infant health outcomes by reducing disparities. Comprised of hospitals from all 50 states, the collaborative is the first to evaluate how pregnancy affects overall population health by linking the inpatient data of newborns to their mothers.
HHS said the Perinatal Improvement Collaborative was developed as a part of the HHS Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Data and Analysis Initiative to enhance maternal health data, improve performance and strengthen evidence-based practices to improve maternal and infant health outcomes.
The collaborative’s two-pronged approach includes capturing and integrating patient and clinical care data — from both mother and infant — to understand drivers of preventable harm and death and improve measurement and comparison across geographies and populations. Using these resources, the collaborative will implement and analyze evidence-based interventions to drive clinical quality improvement and advance health equity.
Each hospital in the collaborative will capture more than 150 measures to understand clinical and non-clinical factors that impact overall maternal and infant health outcomes with an overarching focus on health disparities. Specific areas of focus include hypertension and other disorders, infection, and COVID-19.
To advance health equity, the collaborative will develop strategies to reduce persistent racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities and examine how care may be tailored to mothers with diverse needs.
The collaborative will investigate the outcomes of mothers and babies individually and together as a dyad. The data will shed new light on whether the direct causes of maternal morbidity and mortality increase a newborn’s risk of lifelong health challenges, HHS said.
