By Kate Greenwood
[Cross-posted at Health Reform Watch]
As I have blogged about before, including last year here, research and public health interventions aimed at preventing stillbirth are stymied by a dearth of data. In an article in this month’s Maternal and Child Health Journal, Erica Lee and colleagues at New York City’s Bureau of Vital Statistics evaluate data collection by New York City hospitals before and after the city’s implementation, in 2011, of the 2003 United States Standard Report of Fetal Death. The Standard Report aids reporters by setting forth “a series of checkboxes for potentially fatal fetal and maternal conditions.” Unfortunately, Lee’s research reveals a persistent and widespread failure to collect basic information when a baby dies in utero.
In New York City, Lee found, “fetal death reports frequently supplied ‘intrauterine fetal demise’, ‘stillbirth’, or other inadequate terms as causes of death.” As Lee points out, words and phrases like this, which merely describe what happened without assigning a cause to it, do not inform public health research. In many cases, of course, what caused a stillbirth truly is unknown. Prior research suggests that this is true 10-40% of the time. In New York City, though, even after the implementation in 2011 of the Standard Report, the percentage of reports with ill-defined causes of fetal death remained troublingly high, at 61%. There was also substantial variation from hospital to hospital. The hospitals that were the best reporters assigned a specific cause 87% of the time, while the worst assigned a specific cause 0% of the time.
As Lee and her colleagues explain,
“public health research aimed at preventing fetal deaths is substantially limited by the data available, particularly poorly-defined and nonspecific causes of fetal death. These data quality concerns have forced researchers to conduct resource intensive cohort studies and/or time consuming chart audits to fully understand the causes behind fetal deaths rather than relying on the more readily-available and routinely collected fetal death records.”
Lee suggests that the variation that exists between hospitals represents an opportunity for improvement, which leads to the question of what policy levers could be used to bring all hospitals up the level of the top performers. Read More
