Maternal Fetal Medicine
That is where the MFM program began- we set up clinics in Corpus Christi, Victoria, Laredo, Brownsville, Harlingen, and McAllen. Our MFMs had 30,000 visits last year. Is this making a difference? You bet it is!
Now, onto one of our main stories- our Maternal Fetal Medicine program. You might ask, “Why does a children’s hospital that doesn’t deliver babies have an MFM program?” It all started when Medicaid Managed Care expanded to the Nueces Service Area in 2006 and Dr. Ernie Buck and I asked ourselves, “what is it that we need to improve?” The answer- our high preterm birth rates which was around 15.1% at the time. We didn’t know how to improve it, but that was our goal. We asked the OBs what they thought. Their answer was that pregnant women needed better education around good nutrition in pregnancy and recognizing danger signs of preterm birth. With that, we got a grant and developed educational baby showers reaching thousands of pregnant women. Over a 3-year period, we did see some improvement and learned that we needed more “wrap-around” services like mental health treatments. We also began a deep dive on our data and abstracted every delivery for a year to see how the maternal condition and care affected the infant outcomes. We shared this in 2007 with the OB leaders in our community. At the time 20% of infants went to the NICU, 30% of inductions were not medically indicated, etc. This was the first time they had seen data like that, and everyone worked together to follow the ACOG guidelines more closely. However, in further discussions, I could see there was still a gap. OBs were dealing with very complicated pregnancies, and they had no maternal fetal medicine specialists in our area to ask for help. They worried about fetal demise or severe complications in the mom. Because Driscoll Health Plan was taking on full financial risk, I recommended to the Driscoll Hospital leadership that we needed MFMs in our region to lower these complications, improving the outcomes of infants (our mission) and save dollars (less risk for the health plan).
I credit the hard work of our OBs and MFMs. Thank you for what you do every day to improve infant outcomes and safe deliveries for mothers. While we have a lot to be proud of with our limited resources, there is more work to do as we still have some of our regions in South Texas lagging. In the Nueces Service Area, the preterm birth rates are down to 9.4%. Even though our maternal population has a diabetes rate of 25%, and high rates of high blood pressure, we in South Texas (includes Nueces and Hidalgo Service Areas) have the lowest maternal mortality and severe complications (49.3/10,000) in Texas (the highest is in the Dallas region at 70.5/10,000).
Together, we can continue to make a difference!
Mary Dale Peterson, MD Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Driscoll Health System
DRISCOLL PULSE | page 3
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