In a recent report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that four out of five pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. could be prevented with quality improvement initiatives in the care for pregnant and postpartum women. The report tracked pregnancy-related deaths arising during child birth through one-year postpartum to determine the leading causes by race and ethnicity in order to prioritize interventions and reduce health disparities.
The leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths, which did vary by race and ethnicity, included:
- Mental health conditions, such as suicide and overdose
- Excessive bleeding or hemorrhage
- Cardiac and coronary conditions
- Infection
- Thrombotic embolism or a blood clot
- Cardiomyopathy
- Hypertensive disorders or high blood pressure
With each of these conditions, proper care and treatment could have helped prevent the death.
MOM Can Make it Better
As HealthVerity discovered last year while assembling comprehensive datasets for pharmaceutical manufacturers pursuing vaccination and treatment options for COVID-19, there is a lack of reliable options for studying the maternal journey, particularly information covering race and ethnicity. This is in large part due to the challenges of linking clinical data on both mother and infant while also meeting the complex privacy requirements of HIPAA. However, as the CDC report shows, it is important to have a full understanding of pre- and post-pregnancy journeys in order to provide the needed interventions to save lives.
Seeing a need for this kind of insight, HealthVerity created the Maternal Outcomes Masterset (MOM), which accurately links de-identified healthcare records for over 1.6 million pregnant women to their newborns. This allows clinical researchers to study their journeys from pre-pregnancy to birth and beyond, tracking outcomes for both mother and baby.
Where MOM differs from typical pregnancy-related data sources is with the preservation of critical data elements, such as race, ethnicity and birth events, including death. These valuable data points are often stripped from records to protect the privacy of the mother and child, but through privacy-protecting techniques, we are able to maintain HIPAA compliance, as certified by a third-party determination. This provides a fuller picture of the maternal journey, allowing more in-depth research on care, comorbidities, outcomes and health equity, while maintaining privacy.
This comprehensive real-world data on the maternal journey can provide a better understanding of the impact of treatments and shed light on how to improve access to needed care, potentially preventing needless deaths. Click here to request a demo of this innovative solution.
