Improving Prenatal Care Access
A February Health Focus
Every February, International Prenatal Infection Prevention Month serves as a powerful reminder of the critical role prenatal care plays ensuring healthy outcomes for mothers and infants. Prenatal infections can have devastating effects, increasing the risks of preterm birth, birth defects, and severe neonatal complications. These risks can be reduced with early, consistent, and high-quality prenatal care including appropriate interventions and integrated maternal health services.
Furthermore, the March of Dimes emphasizes that early and continuous prenatal care is essential for screening and intervention in behavioral and medical risk factors that contribute to poor birth outcomes.
The Office of Disease Prevention highlights a stark reality:
Women in the United States are more likely to die from childbirth than women living in other developed countries. Women’s health before, during, and after pregnancy can have a major impact on infants’ health and well-being. Women who get recommended health care services before they get pregnant are more likely to be healthy during pregnancy and to have healthy babies.”
Despite well-documented benefits of early prenatal care, access remains a significant barrier to women, particularly those in underserved, rural, and low-income communities. With these disparities, pregnant people are left without essential medical screenings and intervention that could prevent life-threatening infections and complications.
This gap in care is a public health issue and systemic challenge requiring strategic solutions.
State Client Case Study: Project Management and Quality Strategy
Since 1977, we have worked on numerous engagements and government health care programs that increase access, enhance quality, and improve outcomes for patients across the United States. We are keenly aware of the role of prenatal care in supporting positive health outcomes for women across the nation. We are also well poised to help our state clients ensure the same for the vulnerable and at-risk women in their own communities.
Ultimately, what defines us most as a firm is our people. Many of them have dedicated their careers to supporting government health and human services, and they share the deeply held conviction that what they do matters in the lives of the people our clients serve.
They work hard to forge solid working relationships with our clients, built on foundations of trust we have strived to earn through our history of strong performance and exacting execution. They help our clients meet their goals, one engagement at a time, and each is a rewarding chapter in our effort to support government-sponsored health and human-services programs. We build our entire professional practice around our mission, and the values that inspire them inform all we do on our clients’ behalf.
For one state client, our Consulting team is providing intensive, front-to-back project management and quality strategy support that encompasses all dimensions of their program to develop an incentive model aligned with the state’s population health needs focusing on maternal, metabolic, and mental health. That state’s maternal morbidity rate is one of the highest in the nation; therefore, we designed a multi-factor program that included the development of a real-time risk assessment of severe maternal morbidity prior to delivery. The program required the launch of a value-based payment model that supports whole-person care delivery. The model is organized into three pillars, each of which included both required and optional activities to be implemented by the state.
The program tests whether targeted technical assistance, coupled with payment and delivery system reforms, can drive a whole-person care delivery approach to pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care while reducing Medicaid and Child Insurance Program expenditures.
As part of implementation, we coordinated not only with the state’s health plans, hospitals, and providers, but also with the state’s health information exchange to ensure the increased maternal risk is noted in the health information exchange to promote follow-up care within five days and reduce adverse outcomes.
We hope this Case Study, along with our experience and history of strong performance on government programs, provides some idea of our ability to do these things successfully for our current and potential state clients, both now and in the future. We are passionate about sharing our knowledge and skill with our state partners and look forward to continuing to learn about your state’s needs and projects.
How Myers and Stauffer Can Help
We can support strategic solutions by addressing maternal health disparities with actionable, data-driven solutions that strengthen health care infrastructure, improve provider coordination, and expand access to early, comprehensive care through strategies that:
- Expand Access to Prenatal Care & Preventive Services
-
- Improve Medicaid and private payer reimbursement models to support comprehensive maternal health services.
- Strengthen midwifery, doula, and perinatal health workforce development.
- Facilitate telehealth expansion to increase prenatal care access in rural and underserved communities.
- Support Policy & Payment Reform for Sustainable Change
-
- Assist state agencies in extending postpartum Medicaid coverage to ensure continued care for new mothers.
- Develop value-based payment models that reward high-quality maternal care.
- Foster regional collaborations between healthcare systems, public health agencies, and community organizations.
International Prenatal Infection Prevention Month serves as the reminder that improving prenatal care is more than reducing infections, it’s about savings lives. Real change requires strategic, data-driven solutions that address gaps in access, care coordination and quality improvement.
This month, and every month, let’s work together to strengthen prenatal care systems and improve outcomes for pregnant women and infants.
Contact our Consulting team today to learn how we can help your organization impactful and sustainable solutions in prenatal care.
Author
| Julia Kotchevar, MA
Director, HCBS and Behavioral Health PH 512.340.7425 |
