The following is a guest article by Anish Sebastian, CEO and Co-Founder of Babyscripts.
As winter storms sweep the country and complicate transportation, healthcare access becomes a front-and-center issue. Rural hospitals across the U.S. are shuttering their labor, delivery, and maternity wards, in many cases closing altogether. Pregnant women in remote rural areas are even more at risk this winter than previous years.
Thirty-six percent of U.S. counties now fit the designation of “maternity care desert,” meaning they have no obstetric hospitals or birth centers and no obstetric providers. For hospitals that have managed to keep their doors open against the pressures of financial and safety concerns, the physician and labor shortage has made it increasingly difficult to maintain appropriate staffing levels to serve patients.
For women in these access-poor areas, flagging a risk even an hour or two earlier can be the difference between life and death, between receiving care in time or suffering complications that may carry long-term consequences to the health of mother and child.
Remote patient monitoring technology (RPM) that connects to the care team provides this layer of security, even beyond what a traditional healthcare system can offer. More than filling a need for increasingly dire issues of access, RPM can improve the overall delivery and quality of care through offering continuous touchpoints to mothers who struggle with access. According to the CDC, 80 percent of maternal deaths are preventable. Removing barriers of access through asynchronous modalities of care management is a critical part of delivering those timely interventions.
The CDC report also includes a list of the primary contributors to maternal mortality, identifying two immediate opportunities for RPM to make an impact on maternal mortality rates: mental health and blood pressure-related complications. These two factors alone contribute to more than 40 percent of maternal deaths, and are some of the most easily addressed through remote technologies.
Maintaining a certain blood pressure has proven to affect the risk of hypertension, a direct cause of maternal death on its own and frequently a precursor to cardiovascular conditions that can lead to death. With RPM, women can manage and monitor their blood pressure from home, with data communicated directly back to their provider to facilitate interventions, such as delivery or a medication regimen.
Hypertension has become an increasingly problematic issue for pregnant and postpartum mothers. While typically more prevalent in geriatric pregnancies, new research shows that after taking age into account, women having babies now are about twice as likely to develop hypertension in pregnancy than women from the baby boom generation, which is further tied to a generational decline in heart health.
According to another study, one in 10 women who develop hypertension as a result of pregnancy might not experience it until more than six weeks after childbirth, the typical end of standard postpartum care. This has motivated industry leaders to push for making remote BP management the standard of care through the prenatal period and up through one year postpartum.
Solutions for maternal mental health (MMH) complications are not as far along the adoption curve as blood pressure solution. Improved reporting on and exposure of the issues have accelerated development and adoption in recent months, including a report from KFF showing that women of reproductive age are at highest risk for mental health complications.
Remote screenings for MMH issues through the prenatal and postpartum period, and even pre-conception, offer a preventative pathway to address MMH. Screening for social determinants of health in this period is an equally important avenue for addressing these stats, as women who experience poverty, intimate partner violence, food or housing insecurity, et al. are much more likely to experience MMH complications. If they don’t lead to death, these issues can resurface in the years after childbirth, and have been linked to negative outcomes in the child’s health as well.
In the long term, the sheer amount of data that is collected by remote patient monitoring tools is invaluable for informing decision-making and improving care delivery. Advanced analytics have already been shown to help predict health outcomes and are increasingly helpful to identify trends and focus improvements for specific populations.
While issues such as interoperability and data-sharing have yet to be resolved by innovators, there is a near-term opportunity for dramatically improving population health through data collected by RPM, and stakeholders should be rapidly investing in and implementing these tools.
About Anish Sebastian
Anish Sebastian co-founded Babyscripts in 2013 with the vision that internet enabled medical devices and big data would transform the delivery of pregnancy care. Since the company’s inception, they have raised more than $37M. As the CEO of Babyscripts, Anish has focused his efforts on product and software development, as well as research validation of their product.
