WICHITA, Kan. (Aiexpress) – Kansas doesn’t do a good job of taking care of moms before and after they give birth. The Kansas death rate for moms is 30% higher than what state and federal health officials want it to be.
Wednesday, Gov. Laura Kelly revealed that those outcomes would be changed with the help of new money. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) chose Kansas as one of 15 states to take part in the Transforming Maternal Health (TMaH) Model program. The program includes a $17 million grant over the next 10 years to improve health care for mothers and children who are Medicaid and CHIP members.
The money will help the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) do its job better through programs like Kansas Medicaid and Maternal and Child Health. The TMaH model looks at the whole person when it comes to pregnancy, birth, and care after giving birth. It takes into account the physical, mental, and social needs that women have during pregnancy.
An OBGYN at Healthcore Clinic in Wichita, Dr. Caryn Bryant, said, “The goal is to really give women better prenatal care, better postpartum support, and the chance to be able to have care for the year after they have their baby, instead of the six weeks after they have their baby.”
The money will help Kansas’s attempts to fix problems that exist between underserved groups that are more likely to have bad outcomes for mothers.
From 2016 to 2018, about two-thirds of the mothers who died in Kansas were from racial or ethnic minorities. Only five of the deaths were of white women who were not Hispanic.
Nearly two-thirds of the women who died had either finished high school or the General Educational Development (GED) test, or they had less schooling than that. Not even half of them had private insurance. The rest had Medicaid, no insurance, or no idea what kind of insurance they had.
“The woman may not be able to make it to her doctor’s visit in the first six weeks, and after that,” the man said. “They will get much better care if they have more time to deal with these kinds of situations,” Dr. Bryant said.
The TMaH plan is built on three main points: access to care, infrastructure and workforce capacity, quality improvement and safety, and providing care for the whole person.
With the grant, KDHE can build on its work in the following areas:
- Getting hospitals to become “birthing-friendly”: KDHE is working with the Kansas Maternal Mortality Review Committee, the Kansas Perinatal Quality Collaborative, and other groups to teach and recruit hospitals to become “birthing-friendly” by CMS. TMaH will work with these important public health efforts to get rid of even more obstacles, improve services, and keep patients safe.
- Whole-Person Care: The Kansas Connecting Communities and Maternal Anti-Violence Innovation and Sharing programs run by KDHE will be very important in improving the TMaH model’s patient education and uniform screening parts. When it comes to perinatal mental health, drug abuse, and intimate partner violence, these programs offer providers advice, training, and technical help. It will take more resources to meet the needs of all people when it comes to their mental health and the social factors that affect their health.
- Prioritization of Telehealth and Telemonitoring: TMaH will improve telehealth services to get around geographical problems, making it easier to get in touch with experts and cutting down on travel. KDHE will set up strong telemonitoring for high blood pressure and gestational diabetes, and they will work together on a State Plan Amendment to make more Medicaid programs available.
- Home Visiting Program Expansion: The TMaH payment plan will fill in funding gaps so that home visiting can continue. The strength-based method used by KDHE improves pregnancy, parenting, and early childhood health, and the funding from TMaH increases both reach and quality.
