SMH Joins National Initiative to Improve Outcomes for Mothers and Babies

In an effort to enhance the lives and care for families on the Suncoast and beyond, Sarasota Memorial is among a group of select hospitals participating in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Perinatal Improvement Collaborative. The collaborative includes many of the nation’s leading hospitals caring for diverse populations in all 50 states, using real-time data, analytics and performance improvement methodologies to improve care for mothers and babies across the nation.

Sarasota Memorial is the leading provider of maternity services in the Suncoast region, delivering more than 4,000 babies in 2021. The hospital recently expanded its maternity services with the opening of its new Venice hospital.

“It has always been important to our entire team to do everything we can to ensure safe deliveries for every woman who gives birth at Sarasota Memorial,” said Mary O’Connor, manager of Community Outreach for SMH Women and Children’s Services. “This collaborative is another opportunity to raise the bar and promote equitable maternity services for women across the country.”

The HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative will test interventions and protocols to reduce preventable deaths and complications among mothers and their babies. The program aims to quickly generate solutions for safer obstetric and neonatal care that can be implemented nationwide.

“Maternal health is an important indicator for infant health,” said Dorothy Fink, MD, deputy assistant secretary for Women’s Health and director of the Office on Women’s Health. “If we can standardize quality care for women during pregnancy and after giving birth, we can change the current trajectory of maternal and infant death. When mothers have better health, we create better opportunities for infants and the larger community to have better health. I’m excited this collaboration will help us fulfill the HHS Maternal Health Action Plan and vision that our nation is the safest for women to give birth.”

Collaborative Actions:

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 and together, to understand how outcomes between the two are connected. 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.

The effort will be guided by an external advisory panel including more than 20 expert clinicians and thought leaders, and patient partners.