3Qs with Philly’s Women’s Health Medical Officer

Pennsylvania saw a spike in the rate of severe pregnancy complications between 2016 and 2022, according to a report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. Philly's outcomes were some of the worst. But, the City of Philadelphia is taking steps to curb severe health issues, like blood clots and even kidney failure, that occur during labor and delivery.

In a conversation with City Cast Philly, Dr. Aasta Mehta, Medical Officer of Women's Health for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, shared details about a new program the city plans to launch in early 2024 to better track — and hopefully reduce — such complications.

What's causing these trends to spike up?

It's complicated. So, overall we are seeing that the population that is having babies is older, and the older you get, the more chance that you have a preexisting condition that might make that pregnancy more high-risk. Obesity can also lead to complications in pregnancy, and we know that those rates have gone up in the United States. Outside of that, a lot of that has to do with social determinants of health, all the things that sort of happen in your life that lead up to that pregnancy. This is where you live, the types of opportunities you have, where you work, the type of air you breathe, all of that stuff can come into play when you're thinking about how healthy your pregnancy and childbirth process is going to be.

What is the city doing to help reduce the number of these severe pregnancy complications?

The first thing we're doing is trying to better better understand how often this happens. So, the Board of Health earlier this year approved mandatory reporting [by Philadelphia hospitals] for these severe complications that happen in pregnancy. That’s so we can better understand, is it a couple neighborhoods more so than others? Where should we put resources? And then also, what supports do hospitals need to build in? Or do we need to build up some community support and that connection to the community after the complication? So the first step is to really just better understand what are the complications that we're seeing.

What's the timeline? When would we see results?

We plan to launch this surveillance in the first quarter of next year. So we're going to collect our data for about a year to make sure that we're collecting it properly, and then we'll be able to release that data out to the public.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.