Well, good afternoon, everyone.

I'd like to go ahead and get started.

This is the business session for Thursday, April 28th, 2022.

I'm Kevin McManus, Mayor Pro Tem, uh joined here with we've got seven uh total council members, and I'm sure others will join us soon, but I want to get started because we do have a full agenda for business session.

First item is approval of minutes for business session of April 14th, 2022.

Is there a motion?

So moved.

I'll second.

It's been moved and seconded.

All those in favor, please respond by saying aye.

Aye.

All right.

Uh the motion passes.

The second item is the maternal health pilot presentation.

Please come forward.

Thank you for being here.

Good afternoon.

Before I get started, uh, Mayor Pro Tem, may I ask how long we have on the agenda?

So I respect your time.

Um I think I we have three items total.

I'd say 10, 15 minutes should be plenty of time.

I just want to, if you could keep it to 10 minutes or so, that would be best.

That way we have enough time for questions, because I'm sure there's going to be questions or a discussion afterwards.

You bet.

Well, thank you for having us today.

My name is Carmen Parker Bradshaw.

I'm with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, and there I get to lead our community health, our health equity, and all of our quality of care programs.

So what we're going to talk with you today about is a possible pilot to focus on maternal child health with the city of Kansas City, Missouri.

And with me I have Terry Riley, a colleague.

Hello, my name is Terry Riley, client relationship executive, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City.

It's good to be here.

I remember this place somewhat.

Welcome back.

Okay, we'll move through this really quick because you'll have slides that that I'm happy to respond to via email if you have questions.

And in the amount of time we have, we really want to focus on the on the most important aspects.

To begin with, I want to provide just a little bit of a snapshot of what the maternal landscape looks like from a community lens in Kansas City, Missouri.

The whole urban area, so all the counties that kind of come together.

This is not Blue KC's data.

This comes from public source data and lets you know kind of what the health outcomes look like.

When we talk specifically about maternal mortality, there are many things that I want to just make sure we level set with.

If you look at Missouri, you can see that black women have substantially higher mortality or death rates than white women.

We also see it in the state of Kansas, and compared nationally, this is a growing problem.

Missouri ranks in the bottom 10 nationally, and there's a lot of concerns here we need to talk about.

So a little bit behind the numbers.

Meaning, when you go back and look at the coding that's used, if there could have been earlier detection or intervention or ways that we could connect and provide care to these pregnant women, those deaths could have been avoided.

In Missouri, that's about 82%.

Those are representative of the state, though, and not just our urban core of Kansas City.

When we also look at the numbers, 23% of the pregnancy related and 47% of the pregnancy associated deaths occurred around 43 days after birth.

Very similar for the state of Missouri, which tells us what are we doing not only during the pregnancy, but after the pregnancy to make sure both mom and baby are healthy and stable.

Oftentimes when we look at the data, the leading causes come back to either a clampsia related issues, which is high blood pressure or hypertension that should be detected during pregnancy if there's engagement happening or cardiovascular related issues.

Again, black women have a much higher rate than white women.

Oftentimes, while it's not always the case, a C-section occurs because of some form of pregnancy complication.

It's oftentimes something that happens in the moment at delivery and not planned for.

As well, black women have 49% of a higher likelihood than other women for preterm birth.

Meaning, what are we doing during that pregnancy to make sure those women have everything that they need to stay healthy, to be healthy, to feel like they're in a trusting and engaging provider and patient relationship so that that birth experience doesn't have to be preterm.

In support of that, you can see here, just like with the C-section rates and the maternal mortality for black women, those preterm birth rates are almost double what we see for our white women population.

So let's talk a little bit about the health plan performance here at the city of Kansas City, Missouri.

When we look back at about one year's worth of data starting in summer of 2020, all the way through summer of 2021 with a run-out through the end of 2021 to give you a baseline, and we compare for the city of Kansas City, Missouri, the black women and the white women in some of these measures, you can see there's a really great disparity.

A couple to point out, for example, postpartum depression, we're not catching that early.

That leads to a specific set of complications for mom and family, emergency department visits.