Premier's Commitment to CMS's Maternity Care Action Plan

By Soumi Saha, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, Premier

Premier, a healthcare improvement company with a network of approximately 4,400 U.S. hospitals and health systems and approximately 225,000 other providers and organizations, is committed to reducing maternal and infant harm.

Premier supports recent efforts such as the Biden-Harris Administration’s swift approval of state waivers to extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum women from two to 12 months. Premier applauds the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for supporting this work by a growing number of states seeking to close coverage gaps.

This swift action adds to the administration’s comprehensive whole-of-government approach to improve the health and wellbeing of mothers and infants in America. The newly created blueprint reflects important steps the administration is taking to accomplish this goal, including launching the Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Data and Analysis Initiative with Premier. This initiative will utilize the PINC AI^™ Maternal Health Database to inform data-driven policies that help solve poor outcomes and disparities in maternal-infant care.

Premier is proud to be working with this administration to scale a collaborative of more than 220 diverse hospitals representing every state that will use standardized data to assess the efficacy of evidence-based interventions on maternal infant morbidity and mortality with overarching considerations on health equity including disparities and social determinants of health (SDOH).

Recently, Premier has engaged in a research study to understand current SDOH, affecting mothers and babies, collected across academic medical centers and health systems with efforts aimed at developing a standardized collection method that can be scaled across the nation.

Premier’s Commitment to CMS’ Maternity Care Action Plan

Premier is focused on raising the bar on quality, safety and cost of care for mothers and babies across the U.S. To do so means addressing the need to provide care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status.

Premier commits to collecting population specific data across the continuum of care to understand the scope of maternal and infant harm. Premier will conduct follow-up research to measure progress in maternal and infant SDOH data collection and publish outcomes in an effort to advance health equity and assist organizations in the reduction of healthcare associated disparities. Premier commits to enabling increased insight into the maternal and infant data through the Premier Perinatal Improvement Collaborative; using deep analytics, quality benchmarks and application of its collaborative methodology to target, implement and measure improvement efforts.

These efforts are aimed at improving the health of mothers and families, reducing healthcare disparities and ensuring that women can access screenings, exams, vaccinations and other healthcare services following their birth.