Orlando Health Joins the HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative to Improve Outcomes for Mothers and Babies Across the Nation

Orlando, FL (November 8, 2021) -- Orlando Health Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies and Bayfront Health St. Petersburg are participating in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Perinatal Improvement Collaborative, a large-scale, data-driven collaborative of over 200 leading hospitals caring for diverse populations in all 50 states. The collaborative is overseen by the HHS Office on Women’s Health (OWH), using real-time data, analytics and performance improvement methodologies from Premier Inc. 

“We are thrilled to join the HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative alongside many of the other top birthing hospitals in the country,” said Lori Boardman, MD, chief quality officer at Orlando Health Winnie Palmer. “At our hospital, we deliver over 13,000 babies per year, so it is essential that we join forces with other facilities to address maternal and infant health challenges.”  

The HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative will test interventions and protocols to reduce preventable deaths and complications among mothers and their babies. Using Premier’s comprehensive and timely PINC AI™ Healthcare Database (PHD), a standardized data collection system, the program will be able to quickly generate solutions for safer obstetric and neonatal care that can be implemented nationwide. At its core, the initiative is a health equity effort that strives to address troubling disparities in birth outcomes and examine how care might be reliably tailored to mothers with different needs, through: 

• Reliable and timely data: Up-to-date standardized data used by the collaborative will integrate administrative, quality and safety, cost and utilization, electronic health record (EHR), and social determinants data across settings, including linking mothers’ and infants’ records. This integrated data will help paint a complete picture of the patient and circumstances surrounding clinical care to improve measurement and comparisons across geographies and populations. 
• A broader lens: The collaborative will investigate the outcomes of mothers and babies individually, as well as the dyad, to understand how outcomes between the two are directly linked. Linking the inpatient data of newborns to their mothers provides an opportunity to identify if the direct causes of maternal morbidity and mortality increase a newborn’s risk of lifelong morbidity and mortality. It will also identify existing health risks of women, or those resulting from pregnancy to prevent negative health impacts for both women and their babies. This comprehensive data will help to improve data quality and enhance evaluation and research of pregnancy on overall population health. 
• Identifying disparities: This collaborative aims to address health equity by identifying social determinants of health and uncovering strategies to reduce persistent racial, ethnic and geographic disparities in care to help reduce risks for mothers and babies most susceptible to poor health outcomes. 

“Maternal health is an important indicator for infant health,” said Dorothy Fink, MD, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women’s Health and Director, Office on Women’s Health. “If we can standardize quality care for women during pregnancy and after giving birth, we can change the current trajectory of maternal and infant death. When mothers have better health, we create better opportunities for infants and the larger community to have better health. I’m excited this collaboration will help us fulfill the HHS Maternal Health Action Plan and vision that our nation is the safest for women to give birth. At HHS, we are committed to making this happen.” 

“Premier is passionate about using data that informs clinical best practices to help improve care for mothers and babies,” said Michael J. Alkire, President and CEO of Premier. “We are honored to partner with Orlando Health, to continue providing the gold standard for healthcare data, unmatched measurement and analytics capabilities, and proven track record of working together to help make America the safest place in the world to give birth.” 

The effort will be guided by an external advisory panel comprising more than 20 expert clinicians and thought leaders, and patient partners from MoMMA’s Voices, a coalition of advocacy organizations focused on leading causes of maternal mortality and morbidity. 

About Orlando Health 

Orlando Health, headquartered in Orlando, Florida, is a not-for-profit healthcare organization with $7.6 billion of assets under management that serves the southeastern United States. Founded more than 100 years ago, the healthcare system is recognized around the world for its pediatric and adult Level One Trauma program as well as the only state-accredited Level Two Adult Trauma Center in the St. Petersburg region. It is the home of the nation’s largest neonatal intensive care unit under one roof, the only system in the southeast to offer open fetal surgery to repair the most severe forms of spina bifida, the site of an Olympic athlete training facility and operator of one of the largest and highest performing clinically integrated networks in the region. Orlando Health is a statutory teaching system that pioneers life-changing medical research. The 3,200-bed system includes 15 wholly-owned hospitals and emergency departments; rehabilitation services, cancer and heart institutes, imaging and laboratory services, wound care centers, physician offices for adults and pediatrics, skilled nursing facilities, an in-patient behavioral health facility, home healthcare services in partnership with LHC Group, and urgent care centers in partnership with CareSpot Urgent Care. Nearly 4,200 physicians, representing more than 80 medical specialties and subspecialties have privileges across the Orlando Health system, which employs nearly 22,000 team members. In FY20, Orlando Health served nearly 150,000 inpatients and nearly 3.1 million outpatients. During that same time period, Orlando Health provided approximately $760 million in total value to the communities it serves in the form of charity care, community benefit programs and services, community building activities and more. Additional information can be found at http://www.orlandohealth.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @orlandohealth.