Frequent hospital visits during pregnancy could be a sign that a pregnant person will encounter life-threatening complications during or after pregnancy, according to a new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Cityblock Health. Published in JAMA Network Open , the study found that among nearly 775,000 pregnant people in Massachusetts, 31% of these individuals had at least one unscheduled emergency visit to the hospital, and 3.3% had four or more unscheduled hospital visits.
The latter group was nearly 50% more likely to experience severe maternal morbidity (SMM), which encompasses a range of complications during labor or childbirth that can lead to poor maternal outcomes such as aneurysms, eclampsia, kidney and heart failure, and sepsis. Importantly, the findings also revealed that nearly half of the pregnant people who sought emergency care four or more times during their pregnancy visited multiple hospitals for evaluation. The resulting lack of consistent treatment for patients from any given hospital makes it difficult for hospital-based pregnancy programs to capture the true burden of prenatal and postpartum challenges that these patients experience.
The analysis is the first US-based assessment of an association between four or more emergency-care visits during pregnancy and the risk of SMM. It builds upon a prior study by the researchers, which found that 70% of people who had a pregnancy-associated death during postpartum also visited a ho.