Linkage of Parent-Infant Health Care Claims Reveals Prenatal Care Gaps and Facilitates Congenital Heart Outcomes Study

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12192323/ Rural Pregnant Women Less Likely To Receive Key Ultrasounds Nearly one in four pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid whose babies were born with serious heart defects did not receive a second-trimester ultrasound, a key prenatal test, according to a study in JACC: Advances funded in part by AHRQ. Using combined clinical and claims data sets from New York State, researchers linked surgical registry data of 1,506 infants who had heart surgery within 60 days of birth between 2006 and 2019 to their mothers’ Medicaid claims. They examined prenatal imaging utilization among pregnant women whose babies were born with critical congenital heart defects, and they found that patients living in rural areas were 19 percentage points less likely to receive fetal echocardiograms than those living in nonrural areas.