Healthcare News and Headlines
  • All Technology
  • AI
  • Autonomy
  • B2B Growth
  • Big Data
  • BioTech
  • ClimateTech
  • Consumer Tech
  • Crypto
  • Cybersecurity
  • DevOps
  • Digital Marketing
  • Ecommerce
  • EdTech
  • Enterprise
  • FinTech
  • GovTech
  • Hardware
  • HealthTech
  • HRTech
  • LegalTech
  • Nanotech
  • PropTech
  • Quantum
  • Robotics
  • SaaS
  • SpaceTech
AllNewsDealsSocialBlogsVideosPodcastsDigests

Healthcare Pulse

EMAIL DIGESTS

Daily

Every morning

Weekly

Sunday recap

NewsDealsSocialBlogsVideosPodcasts
HealthcareNewsMDMOM: Innovating Around Maternal Health in Maryland
MDMOM: Innovating Around Maternal Health in Maryland
Healthcare

MDMOM: Innovating Around Maternal Health in Maryland

•February 10, 2026
0
Healthcare Innovation
Healthcare Innovation•Feb 10, 2026

Why It Matters

By targeting preventable deaths—estimated at 80% of maternal fatalities—MDMOM aims to close racial and outcome gaps, setting a replicable model for state‑level maternal health reform. Its data‑driven and technology‑enabled interventions could lower severe morbidity rates and improve equity nationwide.

Key Takeaways

  • •$15.8M HRSA-funded program spans all 32 Maryland birthing hospitals.
  • •80% of maternal deaths deemed preventable, focus on interventions.
  • •Statewide surveillance now includes 27 voluntary plus 5 mandated hospitals.
  • •Implicit‑bias training reached ~4,000 perinatal providers statewide.
  • •Telehealth hypertension program distributes Bluetooth cuffs to 29 hospitals.

Pulse Analysis

Maternal mortality has risen across the United States, with racial disparities persisting for three decades. Maryland’s response, anchored by the MDMOM initiative, leverages federal funding to create a unified data infrastructure that captures severe maternal morbidity events—an often‑overlooked metric that occurs 50‑60 times more frequently than deaths. By standardizing surveillance across every birthing hospital, the state can pinpoint high‑risk patterns, allocate resources efficiently, and benchmark progress against national safety bundles.

Beyond data collection, MDMOM emphasizes workforce transformation. Implicit‑bias training, delivered to roughly 4,000 perinatal clinicians, tackles systemic inequities that contribute to adverse outcomes. The program’s telehealth component further illustrates innovation: Bluetooth‑enabled blood‑pressure cuffs are distributed to 29 hospitals, enabling real‑time monitoring of severe hypertension and rapid escalation of care. Early evaluations suggest improved follow‑up rates, positioning technology as a catalyst for timely interventions in rural and underserved communities.

The Maryland Maternal Health Resources Map rounds out the ecosystem by aggregating more than 2,600 community and clinical services into a single, searchable platform. This tool empowers families to locate postpartum, educational, and social supports near their homes, while giving providers a comprehensive referral directory. Collectively, these initiatives create a scalable blueprint that other states can adapt, potentially reshaping the national landscape of maternal health equity and safety.

MDMOM: Innovating Around Maternal Health in Maryland

By David Raths · Feb. 10, 2026

The federal Health Resources and Services Administration funds state‑level work to address high levels of maternal mortality in the United States and to reduce disparities in maternal and birth outcomes. In Maryland, Andreea Creanga, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, leads the Maryland Maternal Health Innovation Program (MDMOM), a $15.8 million HRSA‑funded program that drives innovation in data collection, quality improvement, workforce development, and community engagement across the 32 birthing hospitals in Maryland. She recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about her team’s work.

Creanga’s team works to develop, implement and evaluate statewide initiatives aiming to eliminate preventable maternal deaths and severe maternal morbidity in the state of Maryland. Nationally, Creanga serves as principal investigator of the Maternal Health Data Innovation and Coordination Hub, a national resource that supports 12 NIH‑funded Maternal Health Research Centers of Excellence.

Interview

Healthcare Innovation: I was hoping you could set the stage by talking about the scope of the problem of mothers dying of preventable causes in Maryland and the racial disparities involved.

Creanga: Maternal mortality has been increasing in the United States. Across the nation, we have seen a marked increase in maternal deaths since the early 2000s. We can debate whether we are doing a better job detecting maternal deaths, because we have made a couple of changes on the death certificates. We have a pregnancy checkbox that can be checked if the deceased was pregnant or postpartum. With that, we think we are capturing more of the maternal deaths, but probably still not all.

We also know nationwide and in Maryland, we have notable disparities in both maternal mortality and also other adverse events in maternal health and adverse pregnancy outcomes. We know that the disparities have persisted over the past 30 years. That's important. The good news is that in Maryland and nationwide as well, about 80 % of maternal deaths have been shown to be preventable. Health‑system and community factors play a role. We know what’s working in maternal health. We know which interventions are life‑saving.

But the metaphor we always use in maternal health is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Below that is severe maternal morbidity. These are near‑misses — women who almost died but survived the complication of pregnancy due to interventions in hospitals or through the health system, or interventions in communities or by patients themselves. We have probably between 50 and 60 times more severe maternal morbidity events than we have maternal deaths. That's why we want to study them in tandem.

HCI: What is the Maryland Maternal Health Task Force and what is its relationship to your MDMOM program?

Creanga: The MDMOM program is actually the Maryland Maternal Health Innovation Program. We are one of the 42 states and the District of Columbia funded for this type of work by HRSA. Our focus is statewide. We actually started this work by establishing a Maternal Health Task Force in the state. We bring together colleagues from hospitals, community members, community‑based organizations, professional organizations, and health agencies. We meet quarterly with the task force, and we have already put together two strategic plans for the state. The most recent one was done in September 2025 for the next five years.

We are now working towards delivering on the tactics and interventions that have been proposed in the strategic plan.

HCI: Is there any kind of networking that takes place among the state‑level groups themselves to share best practices or lessons learned?

Creanga: Definitely. HRSA brings us together a couple of times per year. We do have a bit of a resource hub that interacts with all the states, and they provide resources across the program for all of the states.

HCI: You mentioned before that in terms of interventions, we know what works to lower maternal mortality. So if we looked across the programs across the country, would they be doing pretty similar things, or are there people trying to think outside the box on things that maybe don’t have evidence for them yet, but they’re trying to demonstrate a new kind of intervention?

Creanga: So by and large, we know what works, and we have the professional organizations that have proposed patient‑safety bundles. All sorts of collaboratives across the hospitals work to address certain key causes of maternal mortality and morbidity. But this is called the Maternal Health Innovation Program, so as part of the proposal, the application actually had to include innovations. They could be innovations in how we collect data, how we look at data, how we review information, or specific programs that are innovative, like telehealth initiatives.

HCI: Could you talk about the hospital initiative and how it works to improve systems of care in Maryland hospitals? Do you get participation from all or most of the birthing hospitals in the state?

Creanga: First of all, we started with a surveillance program. Surveillance is just monitoring of severe maternal morbidity events to identify all of them, trying to collect and review the data in the same way across the hospitals.

We started with a pilot of six hospitals back in July 2020 and now we do have all the hospitals participating in this surveillance system. In Maryland, we were able to advocate for and pass legislation in 2025 to bring all the hospitals to this project. We have 32 birthing hospitals in the state. We had 27 of them voluntarily participating. We had five more that we had to somehow push. The legislation did the trick. For the first time, we were able to submit a statewide report to the governor’s office in December 2025 and that was really well‑received by all of our partners.

HCI: Are there programs that go into the hospitals to address things like bias training?

Creanga: Yes. With the first grant that we had from HRSA, we were able to offer implicit‑bias trainings to providers. At the time there was only one training that was dedicated to perinatal health providers in the country. It was developed by the March of Dimes. So we actually purchased licenses that were able to train about 4,000 perinatal health providers in the state of Maryland with that training. Building on that, we developed our own materials and skill‑building exercises and videos about how to talk to your patients and how not to talk to your patients.

We reached a lot of perinatal health providers and created awareness around implicit bias, because that’s the first step.

HCI: Could you talk about your telehealth initiative around severe hypertension in pregnancy?

Creanga: We started in May 2022 with trying to offer expert maternal‑medicine advice support from the University of Maryland Medical Center to the lower‑level hospitals that were part of the University of Maryland Medical System. Our providers here at the Medical Center were credentialed to offer telehealth support, expert advice to their sister hospitals in the system.

Then the Maryland Perinatal Neonatal Quality Collaborative decided to implement statewide the severe hypertension bundle from ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists). Because of that, we saw an opportunity to support them, and we started the second part of the telehealth initiative, which is distribution of free blood‑pressure cuffs with Bluetooth so they can be integrated into the EHR. The idea was to put this type of device into the hands of patients, so that they can check their blood pressure at home, and alert their providers if there are abnormal readings. We hope this initiative will improve follow‑up and get patients seen faster.

We are currently distributing between 13 and 15 blood‑pressure cuffs per day. We work with 29 of the 32 hospitals for this initiative; the other three hospitals have other means of providing cuffs to their patients.

We evaluated the program in the fall of 2025 and are now analyzing the data. We talked to all the hospitals that are part of the initiative and have learned quite a bit, because each hospital did things in a different way. We are learning what worked best for them and then sharing those learnings across the initiative.

HCI: I read that your group created a Maryland Maternal Health Resources Map. What kind of resources are on the map and how would families use it?

Creanga: We are very proud of it. This was a gap identified by the task force initially, and we were asked to support the development of the map.

We started very small, thinking we would only include hospital‑based or clinic‑based services. Then we realized the needs are greater, so we expanded to social services — education, birthing classes, etc. We also incorporated the 211 resource. If you go to mdmomresources.org, you can see the categories we have: reproductive health services, maternal health services, postpartum services, and social services. We have everything organized around 28 categories, totaling more than 2,600 services.

Many patients don’t know how many services are available or where to find them. With a map, families can identify resources in their community, close to their home and the hospital where they’ll give birth, so they can get the supports they need. It’s also a useful tool for providers, who previously lacked a centralized repository and now can use the map themselves.

Key Highlights

  • The MDMOM program focuses on data, quality improvement, workforce development, and community engagement across 32 hospitals.

  • Programs include implicit‑bias training for providers, statewide surveillance of severe maternal morbidity, and telehealth support for managing hypertension in pregnancy.

  • The Maryland Perinatal Neonatal Quality Collaborative supports telehealth initiatives, including distributing Bluetooth‑enabled blood‑pressure cuffs to improve patient monitoring.

  • The Maryland Maternal Health Resources Map consolidates over 2,600 community services, helping families and providers access essential maternal and social‑support resources.

Read Original Article
0

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Loading comments...