Application of disease management principles to pregnancy and the postpartum period

Pregnancy and newborn care rank among the top health care expenditures for health plans and employers. Traditionally treated as episodic conditions, maternity and newborn clinical management is most often reactive in nature, event driven, and not perceived as a continuum. Existing models of pure disease management are not suited for addressing this continuum because the condition of pregnancy is not a disease, is not chronic, and is self-limited. Wellness approaches may be applicable for prenatal care, but they fail to fully engage the complexities and intervention needed for high-risk pregnancies. Case management alone is too comprehensive to focus on the high volume of pregnancies, which must be screened and accommodated at the health plan level. Alternatively, the management of a pregnant population through a continuum starting with early prenatal care and commencing with newborn and maternal postpartum care is optimal. We describe a total maternal-newborn solution (TMNS) that considers pregnancy as a unique, high-volume condition with infrequent, but costly, complications that can benefit from primary and secondary preventive efforts to avoid or reduce the impact of complications in a cost-effective manner. A TMNS helps to improve the quality of care delivered as participants and their health care providers are encouraged to follow standardized clinical guidelines and monitored for compliance. A TMNS is made possible with the use of an enterprise information technology platform that provides a common infrastructure to track participant encounters and interventions and measure and report on maternal and newborn care delivered. Preliminary outcomes for the TMNS program prove it to be a promising approach for addressing the clinical and cost management of the pregnancy continuum.