Thriving Hearts: Healing-Centered, Integrated, Community Maternity Care

Birthing people in the United States experience unacceptable rates of severe maternal morbidity (SMM) and maternal mortality (MM). Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) are a major contributor: among individuals who died during the birth hospitalization, one in three had an HDP diagnosis. Populations that have experienced structural racism are disproportionately affected. Compared with white birthing people, Black birthing people with HDP are more likely to experience severe morbidity, and they are 3.7 times more likely to die from HDP complications. To address the root causes of these disparities, multicomponent strategies are urgently needed. The overarching goal of Thriving Hearts is to implement such a multi-level intervention through Local Health Departments (LHDs), cultivating conditions for mothers and birthing people to not only survive pregnancy, but to thrive. Thriving Hearts is a collaboration among LHDs in ten North Carolina counties, designed to reduce incidence of HDP and its complications through support and connection at the individual, healthcare provider, and community level. At the individual level, Mama Hearts maternity care will provide evidence-based, culturally tailored, holistic preventative care for pregnant people at risk for HDP. At the healthcare provider level, the project will address burnout and compassion fatigue among LHD staff and community healthcare providers through healing-centered, trauma-informed care. At the community level, Loving Connection will deploy community health workers and an integrated medical-legal partnership to provide proactive support through universal, strength-based assistance in a mutual aid context, building awareness of local resources and cultivating spaces for community support, connection, and joy.

The Thriving Hearts study uses a hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation design. To quantify effectiveness, the team will conduct a pragmatic, stepped-wedge, cluster randomized trial, implementing the intervention through LHDs. Participating LHDs will begin in a usual care phase, and they will transition to Thriving Hearts in pairs in a randomly assigned sequence, at 9-month intervals. The team will systematically document usual care in each county. To inform future scale-up and dissemination, the team will conduct a mixed methods implementation evaluation.

The team will use this approach to accomplish the following specific aims: 1) Quantify the extent to which Thriving Hearts reduces incidence of HDP and associated complications and increases uptake of support resources among birthing people in the ten Thriving Hearts counties, using PCORnet, Carolina Cost and Quality Initiative Claims, Birth Certificate, and State Hospital Discharge data. 2) Quantify the extent to which Thriving Hearts improves patient-reported experiences and outcomes, measured through cross-sectional surveys of a subset of postpartum people in each county. 3) Quantify the extent to which healing-centered, trauma-informed care improves health team effectiveness and well-being, measured using cross-sectional surveys of professional quality of life and wellbeing. 4) Identify factors that affect implementation of the Thriving Hearts program at health department- and community-levels using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research 2.0.

The study population will include all individuals who give birth in the 10 Thriving Hearts counties, including Alamance, Caswell, Chatham, Cumberland, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Johnston, Orange, and Person Counties. In 2021, there were 26,900 births in these counties, of whom 29% were non-Hispanic Black, 19% were Hispanic, and 43% were non-Hispanic white. Over the five-year comparative effectiveness study, the team anticipates that there will be ~140,000 births in the participating counties, providing ample power to assess outcomes in the full sample and to perform stratified analyses to test the extent to which Thriving Hearts reduces disparities in processes, experiences, and outcomes.

The study's primary outcome is the incidence of HDP during pregnancy, birth, or within 28 days postpartum, indexed by clinical data (PCORnet), diagnosis codes, and documentation on the birth certificate. Among Thriving Hearts county residents who birthed at UNC-affiliated hospitals from January 2019 through March 2023, 20.4% of Black patients and 17.4% of white patients had a diagnosis of HDP. The team hypothesizes that Thriving Hearts will reduce HDP incidence by 20%, consistent with effect sizes reported for several subcomponents of the multilevel intervention.

Secondary outcomes include clinical processes (first-trimester enrollment Medicaid and WIC, postpartum visit attendance, acute care utilization) and outcomes (HDP morbidity, severe maternal morbidity); patient-reported experiences (person-centered maternity care, autonomy, respectful care) and outcomes (wellbeing, mental health, social support, maternal function); and health care team-reported experience (addressing health-related social needs) and outcomes (wellbeing, professional quality of life, secondary trauma symptoms).