Hospitals cut delivery-visit mortality by 41 percent. Here’s what changed.

Hospitals participating in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Perinatal Improvement Collaborative (PIC) reduced delivery-visit mortality by 41.5 percent across more than 2.6 million deliveries, compared with a 5.9 percent decline among benchmark hospitals, according to new findings from the HHS Office on Women's Health (OWH) and Premier.

The analysis examined outcomes across two baseline years (October 2019-September 2021) and three performance years (October 2021-September 2024).

These findings are among the clearest signs yet that large-scale maternal health collaboratives can help hospitals improve outcomes through shared data, benchmarking, and evidence-based improvement strategies.

Launched in 2020 through a collaboration between HHS OWH and Premier, the HHS PIC brings together more than 250 hospitals nationwide to track maternal and infant outcomes, identify trends and implement clinical improvement strategies aimed at reducing preventable harm.

Improving Outcomes Amid Rising Complexity

The findings are notable not only because of the scale of improvement, but because participating hospitals achieved those outcomes while caring for increasingly complex maternal populations.

Across participating hospitals, chronic conditions such as obesity, anemia and mental health disorders all increased during the study period. Nearly 59 percent of women included in the analysis had at least one chronic condition or quality improvement focus area, while nearly one-quarter had multiple overlapping conditions.

Researchers also found that maternal deaths during delivery hospitalization rarely stemmed from a single complication alone. Nearly all women who died during delivery hospitalization also experienced severe maternal morbidity, with cardiovascular conditions, hemorrhage and blood utilization among the most common contributing complications.

The findings reinforce the importance of helping hospitals identify maternal risk factors earlier while ensuring care teams can respond consistently and effectively when complications escalate.

The HHS PIC also drove improvements beyond maternal mortality alone. Participating hospitals achieved substantially greater reductions in severe neonatal complications than benchmark hospitals, with rates declining by 19.7 percent versus 2.3 percent.

How the Collaborative Model Supports Improvement

The HHS PIC was designed to help hospitals move beyond isolated quality improvement efforts and toward a more coordinated, data-driven approach to maternal and infant health. Through this collaborative, participating hospitals have access to standardized data, shared benchmarking, evidence-based practices, and peer learning across a national network of providers.

Hospitals use the HHS PIC tools and resources to better track maternal and infant outcomes, identify emerging trends, and understand which interventions are leading to measurable improvements across care settings. The collaborative focuses on several priority areas in maternal and infant health, including obstetric hemorrhage, hypertensive disorders, cardiovascular conditions, infections, mental health conditions and neonatal abstinence syndrome.

The initiative also supports hospitals through longitudinal data analysis and peer collaboration, helping healthcare organizations identify successful practices and create consistent and sustainable scale.

Future phases of the HHS PIC are expected to continue to expand longitudinal tracking of maternal and infant outcomes, including efforts to connect maternal and infant data across the continuum of care. This work will support more coordinated interventions and strengthen long-term improvements for families across the country.

Expanding the Model Nationally

As momentum around the collaborative grows, HHS leaders recently announced plans to expand the model nationally through a partnership with Heartland Forward to help more hospitals implement proven maternal health improvement strategies, particularly in rural and underserved communities.

“We want to ensure that every hospital across America has the most effective tools and evidence-based quality improvement initiatives available, so that every woman who delivers a baby in the United States can have the healthiest delivery possible,” said Dr. Dorothy Fink, HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women’s Health.

As hospitals face mounting maternal and infant health challenges, the HHS PIC provides a data-driven framework to enhance the quality of care across the entire clinical journey.

The HHS PIC demonstrates the power of collaboration to drive measurable improvement at scale. To learn how leading health systems are leveraging collaboratives to improve quality, reduce variation and accelerate performance, explore Premier's e-book, "A Smarter Way to Improve Performance: Why Collaboration Is the New Competitive Advantage."