A community approach to implementing evidence-based prenatal care

CenteringPregnancy brings women out of the exam room and into a unique group setting for the highest quality prenatal care while becoming part of a supportive community. The CenteringPregnancy model is evidence-based, and consistently demonstrates better outcomes than those achieved in individual care. Centering is efficient, cost-effective, and reimbursable by both private and public insurers. The Centering Healthcare Institute is helping to improve the health of communities one group at a time. There has been a targeted effort to develop a large scale Centering presence in the Boston area to demonstrate the impact of transforming care across a range of prenatal care settings. A 2007 Yale RCT documented through Centering a 33% reduction in preterm births across overall and a 41% reduction for African American women. In the greater Boston area, babies born to Black mothers are 40 - 60% more likely to be born preterm than the Boston average and two to three times the rate for White mothers. Centering has been adopted in a variety of healthcare settings in the Boston area including community health centers and hospital and private clinics. There are eight approved Centering sites and twenty implementing sites. Boston Department of Public Health has boldly adopted CenteringPregnancy in all eight of their Healthy Start sponsored clinical sites. This presentation will focus on the strategic plan for working locally to implement this innovative model and will include aggregate demographic and outcome data from the approved sites.