Findings from University of Maryland in the Area of Managed Care Described (Home Visits With a Registered Nurse Did Not Affect Prenatal Care In a Low-income Pregnant Population): Managed Care

2024 JAN 02 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Researchers detail new data in Managed Care. According to news reporting out of College Park, Maryland, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “There is an urgent need to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes and decrease their racial disparities in the US. Prenatal nurse home visiting programs could help achieve this by increasing the use and quality of prenatal care and facilitating healthy behaviors during pregnancy.”

Funders for this research include Children’s Trust of South Carolina, Arnold Ventures, Duke Endowment, BlueCross BlueShield Foundation of South Carolina, J-PAL North America Health Care Delivery Initiative.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the University of Maryland, “We conducted a randomized controlled trial of 5,670 Medicaid-eligible pregnant people in South Carolina to evaluate how a nurse home visiting program affected prenatal health care and health outcomes. We compared outcomes between the treatment and control groups and found little evidence of statistically significant differences in the intensity of prenatal care use, receipt of guideline-based prenatal care services, other health care use, or gestational weight gain. Nor did we find treatment effects in subgroup analyses of socially vulnerable participants (46.9 percent of the sample) or non-Hispanic Black participants (52.0 percent of the sample). Compared with the broader Medicaid population, our trial participants had more health and social risk factors, more engagement with prenatal care, and similar pregnancy outcomes.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Delivering intensive nurse home visiting programs to the general Medicaid population might not be an efficient method to improve prenatal care for those who need the most support during pregnancy.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Home Visits With a Registered Nurse Did Not Affect Prenatal Care In a Low-income Pregnant Population. Health Affairs, 2023;42(8):1152-1161. Health Affairs can be contacted at: Project Hope, 7500 Old Georgetown Rd, Ste 600, Bethesda, MD 20814-6133, USA.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Rebecca A. Gourevitch, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, United States. Additional authors for this research include Chloe Zera, Margaret McConnell, Michelle W. Martin, Ruohua Annetta Zhou, Mary Ann Bates and Katherine Baicker.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.01517. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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