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1. How can an app help At-Risk Expecting Mothers?
For nearly 40 years, UnitedHealth Group (UHG) has been a worldwide leader and innovator in the healthcare sphere. Their main objective is to empower people to live healthier lives. Unfortunately, fetal and perinatal mortality rates and risk factors are staggeringly high in the United States, compared to other developed nations. So in 2014, UHG sought to expand their reach in helping mother’s experience full-term, healthy pregnancies. As a part of this effort, UHG sought to discover whether empowering at-risk mothers in group scenarios would improve birth outcomes. They tasked Spyder Trap with supplementing these group sessions with a digital toolkit to improve the birth outcomes among at-risk mothers.
2. At-risk expecting mothers yearn to be empowered
Having worked with UHG on dozens of digital projects, it was clear that Expect With Me would be something altogether different. We relished the challenge. The group prenatal care program, which was spearheaded by UHG and Yale School of Public Health, aimed to replace traditional individual prenatal care by bringing at-risk women and health care providers together in groups. The opportunity was vast. According to The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, babies born to mothers with poor prenatal care are, "Three times more likely to be born at low birth weight, and five times more likely to die, than those whose mothers received prenatal care."
Compared to higher-income women, low-income women are significantly more likely to smoke before or during pregnancy, be obese, experience postpartum depressive symptoms, and have three or more chronic diseases or related risk factors. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, enhancing services for these women in publicly-funded family planning clinics may help reduce disparities in pregnancy and long-term health outcomes among poor.
So, the opportunity was clear. We needed to create an application that would help UHG and Yale empower expecting mothers, who were identified as having met the qualifications for at-risk pregnancies. This was no small task.
3. Solution: A powerful online toolkit for expecting mothers
After months of collaboration between Yale and UHG, Spyder Trap built a user-friendly responsive website to meet the growing demands of in-person group meetings. The platform allows pregnant women to engage in forums, online learning and log progress in between group sessions. Due to the nature of these in-person group meetings, the software continues to evolve to meet the growing needs of groups and their mentors.
Since it launched in March 2014, 500 women have enrolled in Expect With Me. Despite the fact that the program is still in its infancy, positive feedback has been consistent - especially among group moderators. Likewise, outcomes have been highly positive. With more than 12,500 pageviews in 10 countries so far, the Expect With Me website is sure to change the outcomes of low-income, at-risk pregnancies by providing support and a safe community for expecting mothers. Yale is currently studying the program to evaluate the impact and scope of this effort.