Ending Preventable Pregnancy-Associated Deaths in California
California deaths from preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure, plummeted 76% from 2014-2016 to 2017-2019. This was, in large part, thanks to improved diagnosis and treatment guidelines informed by the California Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review (CA-PAMR).
Established by the California Department of Public Health, the CA-PAMR reviews deaths among pregnant or recently pregnant Californians, up to one year after pregnancy, with the goal of eliminating these preventable outcomes.
Assistant professor Jarmin Yeh, PhD, MPH, MSSW, and Dan Sun, MA, data specialist for the Institute for Health & Aging, are working with CA-PAMR to meet this goal.
Yeh provides project oversight and management, while Sun works to identify all California pregnancy-associated deaths. This complex data analysis links vital statistics data and patient-level administrative data from hospitals, emergency departments and ambulatory surgery centers.
To understand and foster discussion about the social determinants of health and possible structural racism, Sun designed a dashboard to describe the conditions of the communities where victims of pregnancy-related deaths lived.
“These collective efforts have contributed to California’s decline in pregnancy-related mortality and a consistently lower rate of overall pregnancy-related deaths compared with the United States,” shared Sun.
