IU Health Bloomington earned a High Performing review in Maternity Care from the US News and World Report for the second year in row, since opening at its new location in 2021.
The annual review looks at factors like C-section rates, newborn complication rates, breast milk feeding rates and vaginal birth after a previous C-section delivery.
Maternal care has a variety of best practice recommendations.
Nikki Benich, IU Health Bloomington’s director of perinatal and pediatric services, said the hospital is focusing on outcomes of hypertension and cardiac issues in pregnancy. It’s also working to collect data for equitable healthcare.
“Being able to track our racial and ethnic disparities is really important to equitable health care delivery," she said. "So that's something that we've really focused on in in the last couple years to ensure that we're giving the same care to everyone.
Read more: Abortion restrictions prevent OB-GYN training, so IU sends its residents to Illinois
Indiana’s abortion ban means IU School of Medicine students must go out of state for part of their OB-GYN training. But Benich doesn’t think the ban, which took effect in August, will affect IU Health Bloomington’s ability to achieve future high-performance evaluations.
Benich said the hospital tracks metrics carefully to evaluate patient outcomes.
"We're identifying early anything that might be emerging in our patients that's contributing to great outcomes, but then also maybe our outcomes going in the wrong direction so we can catch them early. And set a plan in place and fix it."
The US News and World Report received data from 680 hospitals and fewer than half received a high-performing review for maternity care.
IU assistant professor of public health Angela Campbell said she’s not surprised by the ranking. The hospital does a good job helping new mothers through breast milk feeding, which is one of the report's evaluation areas.
“They have a lactation consultant in the hospital that visits your room and helps you with all of those things and answers your questions," Campbell said. "And I think that that is invaluable, especially if you're a mom who doesn't necessarily have a close family member who breast fed.”
Campbell said the rankings are a starting point for evaluating healthcare choices. But people need to consider individually and with their physician what is best.
US News and World Report evaluations typically use Medicare data, which starts at age 65. But that means that data isn’t available for maternity rankings, since most women are done having kids by then.
“So they rely on self reports from the hospital," Campbell said. "So the hospitals have to send in their own information. And I know that research and teaching hospitals are just very on top of collecting data.”
The US News and World Report ranking is for pregnancies with no complicating factors like diabetes or multiple pregnancy – meaning a twin or triplet pregnancy.
IU Health Bloomington partners with the IU School of Medicine and is a research hospital.
