Sarosh Rana, MD, is getting right to work.
Since starting on Aug. 1 as chair of the UNMC Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Rana has set a high and overarching goal for her and the department: Improve maternal health for pregnant and postpartum women across Nebraska.
UNMC’s first female OB/GYN chair, Dr. Rana believes she has the knowledge and experience to address the challenges in Nebraska’s maternal health. Indeed, Dr. Rana feels called to do the work of high-risk obstetrics.
She already is applying her experience in maternal and fetal medicine that ranges from India to Chicago’s South Side. Her personality favors collaboration, and Dr. Rana is tapping new connections both within and outside the med center.
As she moves into a leadership role in maternal health, she envisions an academic medical center that crosses clinical care, research, education and community engagement.
Dr. Rana, who also serves as the Chris J. and Marie A. Olson Endowed Professor in the department, is setting out to join other partners tackling those issues, while being ready to “lead this from the front for the rest of the state.”
“I know there’s a lot of work going on in this space already,” she said. “I just wanted to be part of that team, but at a higher level, at the level of the chair, so I can use my personal experience and my own clinical and translational research and population health research, but also join the existing team doing this work.”
Dr. Rana came to UNMC from Chicago, where she was section chief of maternal-fetal medicine at UChicago Medicine and an obstetrics and gynecology professor at the University of Chicago.
UChicago provides care in an impoverished urban area with a predominantly high-risk patient population and high maternal mortality rates. She learned a lot about how the health system can improve care outside the walls of its health centers and clinics. Working with the community and local organizations, she helped create a community maternal health strategy.
Within the health system, Dr. Rana took on the role of chief obstetrical transformation officer – and helped transform care within the hospital, developing a new community-based care system. That brought high-level ultrasounds, for instance, to the community’s federally qualified health centers, and also created a popular maternal health educational series for providers at the community health centers.
She also was involved in creation of the award-winning “STAMPP-HTN” program – which stands for the Systematic Treatment and Management of Postpartum Hypertension. It ramped up blood pressure monitoring and follow-up visits for hypertension care in the community, improving results for postpartum mothers so successfully that 11 different health systems across nine states have adopted the program.
Dr. Rana sees purpose in all the stops along her career.
During her residency in India, Dr. Rana mastered the intricacies of maternal and pregnancy care in an impoverished, low-resource health care setting.
Practitioners lacked access to ultrasounds and patient health records, she said. Caesarean sections posed significant risks due to limited blood supplies, inadequately trained anesthesiologists and poor infection control protocols.
Working within these constraints, Dr. Rana honed her obstetric skills to an exceptional level, developing expertise in safe surgical techniques for cesarean deliveries when conventional options weren’t available.
She also learned the troubling difficulty in treating pregnant patients with eclampsia – seizures that can be deadly for the mother. She would see mothers die and think, “It cannot be like this. How can you come in seizing and die from pregnancy complication?”
She describes how that crystalized her purpose: “No woman should die bringing life into this world.”
In the U.S., Dr. Rana completed an OB/GYN residency at the University of Chicago and her fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine at Brown University and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island in Providence. She earned a Master of Public Health in clinical effectiveness at Harvard University.
In Boston, she became involved in groundbreaking research into blood biomarkers that signal preeclampsia, which culminated in FDA approval for the markers in 2023.
Now, Dr. Rana brings her research, clinical care and community engagement experience to UNMC.
In Nebraska, she sees some of the same maternal health difficulties she’s experienced before, but across a larger, rural area.
As she starts her work, Dr. Rana has been meeting with providers, experts and leadership within UNMC and Nebraska Medicine. She already is laying the groundwork to implement the STAMPP- HTN program and blood testing for the preeclampsia biomarkers.
In her first six months, she said she hopes to get the “lay of the land” of obstetrical care in Nebraska and understand the key stake holders. She is doing a lot of listening, with plans to reach out to health systems and health centers around the state, community organizations and federally qualified health centers in Omaha to understand their needs.
“It will help us if we improve the care of everybody around us,” she said. “Obviously we want to reduce the overall maternal mortality rate, but it will also reduce the number of really bad outcomes that are coming to us.”
Along the way, her goal is to create a blueprint for maternal and fetal medicine and women’s health that medical centers and rural states can apply. Her plan is called the MOTHER Nebraska Initiative, short for Maternal Outcomes Through Healthcare Expansion in Rural Nebraska.
She understands the challenges ahead – but also strongly believes she is positioned to make a difference.
“With knowledge, time and passion,” she said, “even the most daunting challenges become achievable.”