Why remote blood pressure monitoring should be the standard for maternal healthcare

The US holds the infamous distinction of having the worst rates for maternal mortality and morbidity in the developed world.

Since this bombshell statistic was first released several years ago, the rates have worsened, despite earnest attempts from stakeholders and policymakers to reverse the trends.

Why does the US — with its massive healthcare spending and increased awareness of the problems — still fail to deliver safe pregnancies to its mothers?

Part of the issue is access. Thirty-six per cent of US counties now fit the designation of “maternity care desert,” meaning they have no obstetric hospitals or birth centres and no obstetric providers.

For hospitals that have managed to keep their doors open against the pressures of financial and safety concerns, the physician and labor shortage has made it increasingly difficult to maintain appropriate staffing levels to serve patients.

The root causes of access issues are easier to understand than address, which is part of the reason we’ve seen no movement in improving poor outcomes.

Reversing these trends at the highest levels requires throwing out deeply embedded workflows, shifting mindsets, and uprooting legacy infrastructure — a massive challenge in itself — and even then, it’s likely to take decades to see positive effects on outcomes.

We need to focus on fixing the issues that can help the most people in the shortest time, that don’t require decades of cultural and structural change to resolve. We need to go after actionable targets, starting with preventable prenatal and postpartum deaths and the issues that can contribute to them, like hypertension.

Remote patient monitoring technology (RPM) that connects to the care team provides an immediate solution.

More than filling a need for increasingly dire issues of access, RPM can improve the overall delivery and quality of care through offering continuous touchpoints to mothers who struggle with access.

According to the CDC, 80 per cent of maternal deaths are preventable. Removing barriers through virtual care management, which mothers can access from anywhere, is a critical part of delivering those timely interventions.

For women in access-poor areas, flagging a risk even an hour or two earlier can be the difference between life and death, between receiving care in time or suffering complications that may carry long-term consequences to the health of mother and child.

Blood pressure complications, like preeclampsia and postpartum hypertension, represent some of the most common risks facing mothers — they can be a direct cause of maternal death on its own and frequently, a precursor to cardiovascular conditions that can lead to death.

They are also some of the easiest to prevent and manage with remote technology. With remote patient monitoring, women can manage and monitor their blood pressure from home, with data communicated directly back to their provider to facilitate interventions, such as delivery or a medication regimen.

Hypertension has become an increasingly problematic issue for pregnant and postpartum mothers.

While typically more prevalent in geriatric pregnancies, new research shows that after taking age into account, women having babies now are about twice as likely to develop hypertension in pregnancy than women from the baby boom generation, which is further tied to a generational decline in heart health.

According to another study, one in 10 women who develop hypertension as a result of pregnancy might not experience it until more than six weeks after childbirth, the typical end of standard postpartum care.

This has motivated industry leaders to push for making remote BP management the standard of care through the prenatal period and up through one year postpartum.

In the long term, the sheer amount of data that is collected by remote patient monitoring tools is invaluable for informing decision-making and improving care delivery.

Advanced analytics have already been shown to help predict health outcomes and are increasingly helpful to identify trends and focus improvements for specific populations.

While issues such as interoperability and data-sharing have yet to be resolved by innovators, there is an immediate opportunity to dramatically improve maternal health outcomes through data collected by RPM, and stakeholders should be rapidly investing in and implementing these tools.

Anish Sebastian co-founded Babyscripts in 2013 with the vision that internet enabled medical devices and big data would transform the delivery of pregnancy care. As the CEO, Anish has focused his efforts on product and software development, as well as research validation of their product. To find out more, visit babyscripts.com.