By Ginny Weir, MPH, CEO

I am more than proud to announce the publication of Obstetrical Care Outcomes Assessment Program: A White Paper in Three Parts outlining how OB COAP partners around clinical data to improve birth outcomes. Our series is directed to everyone involved in the birth of babies and funded by a generous grant from United Healthcare.

American maternity care is not meeting our needs. For every non-Hispanic white birthing person who dies, three to four non-Hispanic black birthing people die and almost two and a half American Indian/Alaska native birthing people die. You can read and share articles on rising maternal mortality rates and inequity from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio. Relying on traditional claims and administrative data to monitor improvement is not enough to improve clinical practice and stop birthing people and babies from death and injury.

OB COAP meaningfully and sustainably improves patient care and experience in partnership with member delivery sites and clinicians by providing the right data, precise reporting, and actionable analytics. A continuous data feedback loop informs program-wide and delivery system specific improvement and understanding of intended and unintended impacts of initiatives. We improve care across birth settings by serving as an external resource due to variation in site-level resourcing, staff expertise, and administrative support to evaluate and improve care.

We profile this crisis and how Washington state hospitals and other birthing centers and clinicians are stepping up by joining OB COAP in our series, outlined below:

1. Quality Improvement in the Delivery of Maternity Care overviews the current state of obstetrics care in our region, existing population health data, and introduces the Care Outcomes Assessment Programs (COAP) from Cardiac to Obstetrics care and the impact on our region’s health.
2. Social Determinants of Health and Equity highlights health disparities in maternal care across race, ethnicity, education level, income, geographic location, and OB COAP’s ability to use timely clinical data to identify and respond.
3. Creating Sustainable, Person-Centered Improvement Processes describes the data infrastructure with clinical data feedback, financial models needed to support these processes, action steps for each sector, and the need for patient-reported outcomes.

Read our series and ensure your hospital or other birthing center or maternity care practice group is a member of OB COAP.