Overview
The Maternity Care Arrangement is designed to allow the spectrum of maternity care providers to focus on prenatal care, delivery, postpartum, and newborn care in an integrated fashion for a mother and her baby. Quality measures related to each of these stages of care help reinforce the care connections built into the Arrangement and provide a standardized set of measures for maternity care providers statewide. Measures for the Arrangement include, for example, rates of postpartum complications, cesarean sections (C–sections), preterm births, and low–birth weight newborns. Providers have the opportunity to realize shared savings if they focus on health education, increased uptake of prenatal care, pre– and inter–conception counseling, appropriate C–section rates and resource utilization, screening for postpartum depression, evidence-informed home visits, and other evidence-based interventions that lead to improvement in maternal care and newborn outcomes.
A key advantage of the Arrangement is that it puts maternity providers in the lead by creating a dedicated, all-inclusive budget for pregnancy, delivery, early postpartum, and newborn care. Providers can drive quality improvements by ensuring organized, integrated, and cost-effective care across the continuum for both mother and baby. Another advantage of the Maternity Care Arrangement is that it provides an impetus to streamline the continuum of maternity care, which can be overlooked in larger scale, population-based healthcare initiatives. Finally, the attention and linkage to early outcomes for the newborn will help improve the well–being of the next generation of New Yorkers and curb future Medicaid costs.