Westchester hospital sets out to improve maternal health outcomes ahead of Mother's Day

SLEEPY HOLLOW — Phelps Hospital launched Northwell Health’s Maternal Outcomes (MOMs) Navigation program in an effort to improve maternal outcomes by providing birthing people with resources, social services and education during and after pregnancy.

The program focuses on high-risk patients, according to a press release announcing its implementation at Phelps. Participants are chosen based on the codes used to identify illnesses on a patient's electronic medical chart, which helps reduce biases in the selection process.

"We know that Black women have more severe maternal mortality than any other racial group, and it's regardless of ability to pay (or the) type of insurance that they may have," said Dr. Karen Murray, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology and leader of the MOMs Navigation program at Phelps Hospital. "We saw this as a great opportunity to see how we at Phelps could make a difference in what was happening in the community at large."

The MOMs Navigation program launched this April and has secured funding from donors to run for three years.

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'We kind of fell in love with this program'

Phelps is not the first hospital in the area to implement the MOMs Navigation program. The initiative began with Dr. Zenobia Brown in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis.

"(Dr. Brown) wanted to follow patients postpartum... because we were sending patients home a lot earlier than we used to," Murray said. "Her plan was to check up on them and see how they're doing."

Brown started the program at three of Northwell Health's 10 birthing hospitals: Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Huntington Hospital and South Shore University Hospital.

"So what the program did is, they looked at clinical and social support and advocacy," Murray said. "They tried to assess culturally what's going on with the patients. So if patients had high blood pressure, they tried to connect them with their primary care doctor, follow up or cardiology.

"They initiated the outreach to the patient."

According to Murray, the hospitals saw a "20 percent reduction in rehospitalization" for patients who were enrolled in Brown's program, results which were confirmed by a study of the program that was published in 2023. The program provided comprehensive assistance, called "wrap-around" care. If a patient was facing food insecurity, for example, they were connected with WIC.

"So that's why we kind of fell in love with this program," Murray said.

How the program helps Black patients in the Lower Hudson Valley

The MOMs Navigation program uses electronic medical chart codes to choose participants, which is considered a key feature of the program, according to its press release. Pregnant patients whose charts indicate codes for illnesses like high blood pressure, for instance, are invited to the program.

"The codes help to remove bias because the code doesn't come with a nationality or ethnicity," Murray said. "You don't know their socioeconomic status. You don't know anything about them. And so by just searching (for) the code, you're getting rid of that unconscious bias."

Nneka Walker benefitted from the code-based selection system. In 2022, she was chosen to participate in the MOMs Navigation program while receiving medical care for her pregnancy at Katz Women's Hospital at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Due to her age (she was 34 at the time), she said, her pregnancy was considered high risk.

"I had an emergency C-section, and then they appointed me with a nurse practitioner," Walker said of giving birth to her second son, Neko, who turns 2 in June.

"(The program) kind of gives you the confidence to keep going and pushing forward and that someone is caring about you," Walker continued, "Looking in on you, making sure that not only the baby is okay, but you're okay, too."

The MOMs Navigation program may also have cultural impacts beyond removing unconscious bias from its participant selection system. The program could lead to more culturally competent care, according to Cheryl Brannan, president and founder of Sister to Sister International, Inc., a Westchester County-based organization that focuses on Black maternal health outcomes as one of its main issue areas.

"Black women quite often say that they are not listened to or heard by their healthcare providers," Brannon said. "The multifaceted MOMS initiative will assist providers in becoming more culturally competent and lead to better care," Brannon said.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Phelps Hospital launches program to improve maternal health outcomes