Data-driven solutions for maternal health

December 04, 2024

By: Dr. Kelli Tice, Vice President of Medical Affairs & Chief Health Equity Officer at GuideWell and Florida Blue

Florida’s recent ranking of #39 on the State Scorecard on Women’s Health and Reproductive Care is a wake-up call. As a Black mother of four in Florida, I find the recent Commonwealth Fund findings disappointing.

As health care leaders, we've been working to close the gap in health disparities for far too long. Unfortunately, the data tells us we still have a long way to go.

Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. Environmental factors like lack of transportation, poor housing conditions, and living in rural health care “deserts,” create barriers to care that can worsen the disparity in prenatal care usage, specifically among communities of color.

In Florida, there is a stark contrast between rural and urban areas when it comes to access to birthing hospitals. One hundred percent of women in rural areas are more than 30 minutes from a birthing hospital, compared to just 10% of women in in urban areas. As a result, 20.8% of women received inadequate prenatal care, compared to 14.8% in the US.   

Despite these disparities, there is hope. 

At GuideWell – a health solutions company that includes Florida Blue, the leading health insurance company in Florida - we are leveraging data and analytics to gain a clearer understanding of the root causes of these disparities and to find ways to make improvements.  

Our maternal health equity dashboard helps inform our approach to women’s health care. This tool collects members’ pregnancy and birth outcomes data, sorts it by race, ethnicity, and language, and incorporates area deprivation index and social vulnerability index data from the U.S. Census.  

Armed with this data, we learned that 80% of poor maternal outcomes are preventable, and many are related to disorders of blood pressure. Preeclampsia occurs in about 5% of all pregnancies and is one of the leading causes of maternal deaths. Annually, it is responsible for more than 70,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 fetal deaths worldwide.

Supported by this data, we teamed up with the Preeclampsia Foundation and Florida Woman Care, a large OB/GYN provider group, to scale solutions by distributing blood pressure cuff kits to high-risk mothers. With this partnership, thousands of expectant mothers in Florida who face high-risk pregnancies can monitor their health at home – which can lead to early intervention, improved outcomes, and potentially lives saved.

We also extended this blood pressure self-monitoring effort to our existing maternal health programs. We tapped into our existing prenatal and postpartum education program, Healthy Addition®, to identify high-risk moms who would benefit from a blood pressure cuff. We partnered with the American Heart Association to deploy blood pressure cuffs to those individuals. Many members who received kits said they wouldn't have known that they had high blood pressure without them. 

This self-monitoring model empowers patients with the tools and information they need to better communicate with their clinicians if they believe they are at risk. Clinicians are provided with crucial clinical information to help them direct patient care. 

When we follow the data, we can identify solutions that work. 

We recognize that solving health inequities won’t happen overnight, and we aren’t stopping at maternal health. Our Total Health Index and social determinants of health dashboard are helping to uncover insights to address health inequities in diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and more.

We owe it to ourselves, our families, and our communities to keep pushing forward, even when the health equity journey is long and challenging. In the self-monitoring blood pressure case above, earning and cultivating the trust of our communities required patience. But by capturing the right information, sharing best practices, and adopting effective approaches and new ways of addressing long-standing challenges across different parts of the health care landscape, we will make a real difference for individuals and families across our state.