Thanks to the data collected by the Electronic Health Records (ECE), it is possible to improve the medical care of mothers and their babies.
One of the goals of the United States government and its Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to improve maternal health outcomes, such as reduce maternal mortality rates, and eliminate inequities between population groups. Therefore, the collection and use of health data and information is important to find the factors that determine health problems.
ECEs have the ability to collect data on a large scale, which are useful for conducting research that proposes improvements in medical care, both for pregnant women and for mothers and their children. Likewise, it allows linking the data with other information such as social determinants of health, demographic data, mortality, among others.
Comprehensive care for pregnant women includes various specialists, especially professionals in obstetrics and gynecology. In this way, it is necessary that the data collection is adequate, so that the information obtained by each specialist can provide better results in medical care.
HHS has implemented a strategy for data standardization in maternal health, which improves the data infrastructure in this area. All were implemented in the first months of the current administration, in March 2021:
- The Severe Maternal Morbidity and Mortality ECE Data Infrastructure project of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Health of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
- The MATernaL and Infant Network to Understand Outcomes Associated with Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder during Pregnancy (MAT-LINK) project of the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
- CDC's National Center for Health Statistics project Improving Surveillance of Maternal Health Clinical Practices and Outcomes with EHR Visit Data from Federally Qualified Health Centers
