Perinatal Improvement Collaborative to Improve Outcomes for Mothers and Babies Across the Nation

Atrium Health announced it is participating in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Perinatal Improvement Collaborative, a large-scale, data-driven collaborative of 200+ leading hospitals caring for diverse populations in all 50 states. The collaborative is overseen by the HHS Office on Women’s Health, using real-time data, analytics and performance improvement methodologies from Premier Inc.

The HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative will test interventions and protocols to reduce preventable deaths and complications among mothers and their babies. Using Premier’s comprehensive and timely PINC AI™ Healthcare Database (PHD), a standardized data collection system, the program will be able to quickly generate solutions for safer obstetric and neonatal care that can be implemented nationwide.

“We are excited to participate in this collaborative to continue to understand clinical and non-clinical factors that impact overall maternal and infant health with an overarching focus on health disparities,” said Dr. Suzanna Fox, Enterprise Deputy Chief Physician Executive and Enterprise Leader for the Women’s service line. “This work will help us to develop strategies to reduce persistent care variation including racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities and provide the best care for our patients.”

The initiative is a health equity effort that strives to address troubling disparities in birth outcomes and examine how care might be reliably tailored to mothers with different needs, through:

• Reliable and timely data: Up-to-date standardized data used by the collaborative will integrate administrative, quality and safety, cost and utilization, electronic health record (EHR), and social determinants data across settings, including linking mothers’ and infants’ records. This integrated data will help paint a complete picture of the patient and circumstances surrounding clinical care to improve measurement and comparisons across geographies and populations.
• Broader lens: The collaborative will investigate the outcomes of mothers and babies individually, as well as the dyad, to understand how outcomes between the two are directly linked. Linking the inpatient data of newborns to their mothers provide an opportunity to identify if the direct causes of maternal morbidity and mortality increase a newborn’s risk of lifelong morbidity and mortality. It will also identify existing health risks of women, or those resulting from pregnancy to prevent negative health impacts for both women and their babies. This comprehensive data will help to improve data quality and enhance evaluation and research of pregnancy on overall population health.
• Identify disparities: This collaborative aims to address health equity by identifying social determinants of health and uncovering strategies to reduce persistent racial, ethnic and geographic disparities in care to help reduce risks for mothers and babies most susceptible to poor health outcomes.