A project headed by Ann Anderson Berry, MD, chief of the UNMC Division of Neonatology and principal investigator of the Nebraska Perinatal Quality Improvement Collaborative, will use Rural Health Transformation Project grant funds to transform maternal and neonatal health outcomes in the state.
“There are large disparities in maternal health and neonatal outcomes that need to be addressed,” Dr. Anderson Berry said. With $2 million in first-year funding and a potential $10 million five-year initiative, Dr. Anderson Berry and her team will be focusing on rural areas of Nebraska where maternity healthcare deserts are prevalent.
“In conjunction with DHHS, we have developed a five-year plan to work closely with rural hospitals to increase their expertise, the physical resources that are available to them and the ongoing care coordination and regionalization of perinatal care for the state of Nebraska,” she said.
“We want the right patient to be in the right hospital at the right time, and we need to have appropriate understanding of what each hospital is capable of – and what each infant and mother needs – in order to move individuals in a timely fashion to higher levels of care.”
Provisions of the grant will allow Dr. Anderson Berry and her team to work with Nebraska hospitals to:
- Enhance emergency room delivery readiness: “We have 40 hospitals in the state of Nebraska that don’t have delivery services,” Dr. Anderson Berry said. Part of the RHTP funding plan is to provide basic equipment and training in the case of emergency births at those locations.
- Assess hospital needs: The team is already meeting with leaders, including physician and nurse leaders, at each of the state’s 43 active-delivery hospitals to identify gaps in staffing, equipment and specialized care. “There are a wide variety of issues that each of these hospitals has to address, really in isolation from a system,” she said. “We, as NPQIC, help them to feel part of a system,” including exploring critical shortages in equipment and blood products for high-risk cases like hypertension or hemorrhage.
Dr. Anderson Berry said the NPQIC can act as a “plug and play resource” for the hospitals, providing modules for hospital implementation in areas such as policy, equipment and order sets.
“We’ll do the work of sorting through the literature, make sure everything is evidence based, use national resources, and then we’ll bring it to the hospitals,” she said.
Looking ahead, Dr. Anderson Berry notes that NPQIC will work with Nebraska DHHS to assess and certify hospitals into levels of care for deliveries and NICU deliveries as part of the regionalization of care.
“We want to increase the ability to get a quick connection between facilities and ensure that the expectant mother has the appropriate handoff to get either the care she needs or get to the right location,” she said.
The project roadmap focuses on transitioning from assessment to robust network building over the next several years.
“NPQIC has worked with all of these hospitals individually for the last 11 years. Moving forward, there’s going to be a lot of additional work to get these data informed network relationships established, so that people feel like they’re not alone when they’re in a high risk delivery and the only boots on the ground,” Dr. Anderson Berry said.
Funded by CMS. Learn more at dhhs.ne.gov/RHTP.