CAI Joins Yale University and Three Northeastern Hospitals in Launching Maternal Health Inequities Research Study

NEW YORK, NY (June 9, 2022) – CAI announced today that it is joining Yale University and three regional medical systems to launch a research study on maternal health inequities.

With funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and working in partnership with Black and Latina women—the people most affected by disparities in maternal health outcomes—the five-year project will explore ways to improve the quality of care provided to women and their babies in the period surrounding birth and beyond.

The research study will compare the effectiveness of two community-based interventions designed to improve clinical outcomes among women who are more often underserved or experiencing the greatest disparities in health outcomes at three sites: Yale New Haven Hospital; John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, NY; and UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, MA. A primary goal of the interventions is to increase staff and administrators’ ability to detect and help manage postpartum hypertension, a significant cause of maternal mortality and morbidity that disproportionately affects Black and Latina women.

CAI will take the lead in training healthcare providers and extended care teams on anti-racism, implicit bias, and core components of the health interventions at the three study sites.

Additionally, CAI will provide enhanced support to the Buffalo site, where it has designed and implemented successful community-led projects addressing maternal health, chronic disease, tobacco use, COVID, and teen pregnancy. This will include working with the Buffalo Center for Health Equity and Buffalo-based African American Health Equity Task Force, whose vision is to eliminate race and ethnicity-based health disparities among African Americans.

CAI will also work closely with pregnant and postpartum women from the Buffalo communities most affected by enduring disparities to identify the issues they face in accessing care. The women’s partnership throughout the project will be critical to ensuring that their community’s needs, attitudes, and preferences regarding postpartum care are identified, understood, and translated into maternity and postpartum care practice.

“Pregnancy risks are unacceptably high among women in priority populations who have been historically underserved and who have experienced systemic racism,” said Lindsay Senter, CAI Vice President of Research and Evaluation. “We are thrilled to take part in groundbreaking research that places community voices front and center, to ensure that members of marginalized communities are engaged and have a voice in creating the systems that serve them.”

CAI will start recruiting community research members in Buffalo and start training staff at the three clinical trial sites in early 2023, after the planning period.