Statement on GAO Report on Report Maternal Mortality and Morbidity

Premier applauds House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-MA) and Ranking Member Kevin Brady (R-TX) for calling on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to assess how to improve maternal health outcomes.

What jumps out from the GAO report is the lack of standardized outcome measurement and collection of complete, actionable data on maternal-infant health. Reliable data is essential to identifying the core problems and the measures and processes needed to improve outcomes.

This is why Premier is excited to be working with the HHS Office of Women’s Health on one of the projects identified in the report. Through this partnership, HHS will be leveraging our standardized data with 1.2 million annual births to understand what is driving deaths and harm to new mothers and newborns. Also as part of this effort, Premier is uniting a cohort of more than 200 hospitals across the country to reduce health disparities, scale standardized, evidence-based practices, and reliably measure associated outcomes.

We look forward to working with Congress to use these insights to advance data-driven policies that help solve poor outcomes and disparities in maternal-infant care.