Over the last 15 years California has seen a continual rise in three key benchmarks of maternity care: the rates of maternal mortality, cesarean section utilization, and elective deliveries. For example, surgical delivery of babies, also known as cesarean delivery, has jumped 50% in California over the last decade with no demonstrated improvement in outcomes over vaginal childbirth. Cesarean deliveries now account for 32% of births in California, raising the potential for increased rates of surgical infections, placental complications in future pregnancies, and higher costs to patients and society.
To reverse these trends, improve care, and inform decisionmaking, California's payers, providers, and patients need timely information about the quality of maternity care being delivered. The California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (CMQCC), a nonprofit stakeholder group with expertise in evaluating variation in the quality of maternity care and leading hospital quality improvement programs, aims to fill this gap.
In 2011, the CMQCC established the California Maternal Data Center (CMDC) to collect data on maternity care practices and generate clinically meaningful metrics that will be:
- Reported back to providers in rapid-cycle fashion to motivate care improvements
- Reported publicly to consumers and other stakeholders over time to better inform decisionmaking
A key objective of the CMDC is to minimize the burden of data collection on hospitals; it draws upon existing hospital discharge and birth certificate data that hospitals already collect and report to the state. The CMDC has completed a pilot phase with six California hospitals to test the data collection and reporting infrastructure, and is now ready to expand to more hospitals.
The CMDC is supported by funds from the California HealthCare Foundation and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Reproductive Health.
To learn more about the CMDC and find out how your hospital can join the effort, visit the website through the External Link below.