The university’s awarded initiative, known as the Systematic Treatment and Management of Postpartum Hypertension program, focused on studying how a series of interventions could play a role in improving outcomes for patients with the condition, according to an Oct. 24 news release.
Noticing a gap between the percentage of Black and white mothers’ attendance at their postpartum six-week visits — 30% for Black patients and 53.5% for white patients — is what prompted UChicago researchers to test the interventions.
Adding patient and provider education, updating clinic protocols, distributing a treatment and management kit for hypertension patients increased postpartum visitation, closing the disparity gap to 33.5% for Black patients and 59.4% for white patients.
From there, researchers added the option for patients to have a telehealth visit, which boosted attendance to 76.3% for Black patients and 76.7% for white patients — reducing the disparity gap to 0.4%. A final intervention, which involved a remote patient monitoring program, further improved the rate of postpartum follow-up visit attendance to 83.1% with no disparity between races.
Fewer patients also had high blood pressure after these implementations were added. The clinical outcome was the same for both Black and white patients, according to the release.
The award is given annually to systems “that achieved a measurable, sustained reduction in one or more healthcare disparities,” the release states.
Jonathan Perlin, MD, PhD, president and CEO of The Joint Commission Enterprise, called UChicago Medicine’s research “exemplary” and noted that it “has shown that healthcare disparities can be improved – and even eliminated – with intention in determining mechanisms of disparity and perseverance in sequentially addressing them.”
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