Broadband Connectivity and Maternal Health

The United States has the highest level of maternal mortality of any industrialized country.  And deaths from pregnancy-related causes strike women of color and those who live in rural communities especially hard.  This is a crisis.  It requires everyone to identify how they can help because so many studies show that most pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.... We used authority under the Data Mapping to Save Moms’ Lives Act to update the agency’s Mapping Broadband Health in America platform to include maternal health data.  It is a tool that can help us better understand the intersection of broadband access and maternal care—and the possibilities that telemedicine presents.  Then we opened an inquiry to engage policymakers, healthcare professionals, and groups advocating for better improved care to understand the ways this data can assist efforts to address the maternal health crisis.  So many stakeholders responded to our inquiry with thoughtful ideas.  We took a cue from them and that is why today we are sharing that we are updating our platform with new data.  Next month, we will be adding information proxies to the Mapping Broadband Health in America platform that we developed with the assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Resources and Services Administration to help close gaps in reportable maternal mortality and morbidity data.  We are also adding facts about infant health outcomes, breast cancer, and social determinants of health data like food insecurity.  On top of this, we have refined our own broadband mapping data, so that it is more accurate and reflects new and higher broadband speed standards.  These improvements are meaningful and over time I expect they will yield new insights into our maternal health crisis—one as a Nation we have to fix.