October 16, 2024
Human-centered digital health solutions offer a promising path forward. These solutions empower women with timely access to care, improve patient-clinician communication, and ultimately reduce adverse maternal outcomes.
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Addressing Maternal Mortality with Human-Centered Digital Health Solutions
The United States has the highest rate of maternal mortality of all developed countries and a concerning rate of women suffering preventable adverse health outcomes attributed to pregnancy. Compounding the issue, most practices over-index on high-risk patients at the cost of not being able to detect those with rising-risk who account for a greater share of preventable maternal health outcomes.
This issue is exacerbated by the racial disparities that exist across all US income and education levels. Maternal mortality is considerably higher in Black women than in White women as a result of health inequities, and thus the digital health ecosystem can do much more than just ensure women survive the birthing process. While not a complete panacea, digital maternal health systems can increase access to timely healthcare, with one survey demonstrating that 70% of those using digital healthcare tools felt more empowered on their maternal health journey.
Digital solutions that incorporate human-centered design for maternal health act as a gateway to enhance accessibility to good-quality healthcare teams and services while providing patients the opportunity to personalize their care experience. Mother Goose Health is the leading technology-enabled maternity health management solution with this orientation. The founders are driven to apply human-centered design to understand how the multiple stakeholders participating in maternal care unwittingly perpetuate these outcomes. Mother Goose Health undertook this journey not with the intent to identify a single point of failure, but rather to deeply understand and put forward a new type of solution to this profoundly complex problem in today’s healthcare system.
The overarching goal for all those working at the point of care in obstetrics is to ensure a mother can safely deliver a healthy baby. But things go off track when care models are stretched thin in under-resourced areas, and this is compounded by generational inequity and mistrust. This results in a flood of concerns from pregnant women, creating noise with false negatives and false positives. Care teams, reacting out of caution, consequently become overwhelmed. This constant reactivity impacts productivity and care quality, making it harder for clinicians to separate real issues from background noise and focus on the patients who need the most attention.
Human-centered design is a proven way to generate market breakthroughs and sustainable growth across many consumer categories. It is now gaining traction in healthcare as a powerful tool for ensuring inclusiveness, engaging stakeholders, and seamlessly connecting design with implementation. Studies across various disciplines show its effectiveness in enhancing health and development programs. Experts, drawing from their experience with over seventy digital health initiatives, believe human-centered design is a practical approach that supports health workers and communities in their quest for quality healthcare and equity.
By focusing on the actual needs of people, and not the use of high-end tech and shiny new gadgets, a human-centered design approach is used to understand and attend to the deep-rooted challenges that customers face, and channel that empathy to fuel a creative team’s vision for a better experience.
Rather than starting with a flawed solution, human-centered design begins with the goal of creating a desirable experience. This method helps designers craft interactions and solutions that exceed customer expectations. The key – and often the challenge that such creative teams face – is identifying the most important problems to solve among the many encountered when engaging with customers.
Due to overwhelming system pressures, clinical teams often lack the capacity to reclassify patients initially screened as low-risk. But the real issue isn’t just a capacity problem; it’s a systemic misdirection of attention that can be explained by survivorship bias – focusing on those who pass through a selection process while overlooking those who don’t.
Care teams, focused on high-risk patients flagged by existing tools, neglect those who are initially low-risk but are at risk of developing future complications. This illuminates the real challenge – over-indexing on high-risk patients at the cost of not being able to detect those with rising-risk accounts for a greater share of preventable maternal health outcomes.
Using a human-centered design process, the Mother Goose Health team created a solution that benefits both clinicians and pregnant women, reducing adverse maternal health outcomes and cutting down on the bias that leaves many without the appropriate care later in their pregnancy. By engaging with pregnant women from diverse backgrounds during their research, they discovered the issue wasn’t a lack of education, but a need for accessible, judgment-free choices in collaboration with healthcare providers.
Furthermore, human-centered design has the unique ability to consider the needs of a patient's support circle and insurers, providing an unparalleled way of understanding why problems persist. It is for this reason that the Mother Goose Health team hones their focus on an entire category of services that together, are essential for delineating the deep-rooted problem. By addressing the needs of both patients and their care teams, Mother Goose Health creates a service that caters to all those involved in an individual’s care.
Mother Goose Health has reimagined the pregnancy experience for both patients and their wider support network, creating a solution that benefits women of all backgrounds and supports the delivery of a healthy baby and a healthy mother. In the segment to come, we’ll explore how human-centered design has been used to develop Mother Goose Health’s unique approach to this complex, multifaceted issue.