Characteristics of Pregnancy-related Health Events Across Care Settings Nationwide in PCORnet®

The maternal mortality rate in the United States is higher than peer countries throughout the world. There is a critical need to implement and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to address factors that contribute to maternal mortality and morbidity (MMM). Legislation passed by the US Congress in 2019 reauthorized funding for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and identified maternal morbidity and mortality as a research priority. PCORnet® is a large, distributed "network of networks" funded by PCORI to improve the nation's capacity to efficiently conduct definitive health research. PCORnet® Network Partners convened a workgroup of experts in topics related to MMM-including patient stakeholders-and developed an exploratory query to identify and characterize the cohort of patients with pregnancy-related health events served by health systems participating in PCORnet. This article presents query results for 1.1 million pregnancies resulting in delivery or interruption that occurred between July 28, 2021, and July 28, 2023 among patients receiving care at 72 sites participating in PCORnet. Three percent of patients experienced severe maternal morbidity, and 357 cases of mortality were recorded. The results also include occurrence of mental and physical comorbidities in the prenatal, peripartum, and postpartum periods. These data are intended to support use of the PCORnet research infrastructure to produce evidence that matters to patients, caregivers, and the broader public health and health care communities. We also discuss ways to enhance the PCORnet infrastructure to accelerate maternal health research, including work that is currently underway to augment data pertinent to studying MMM.