HEAR4MB (Healing, Equity, Advocacy and Respect 4 Mamas and Babies), a text-based system connecting pregnant women and new mothers with health services, will expand throughout South Carolina and into North Carolina with a new $13.3 million grant from The Duke Endowment. The program, created by the Medical University of South Carolina, addresses a maternal mortality crisis while leveraging more than $200 million in Rural Health Transformation Program funding South Carolina was awarded.
The program serves primarily women on Medicaid, which covers approximately 60% of births in South Carolina and a higher percentage in rural areas. It reaches women needing mental health or substance use services, particularly new mothers. “What The Duke Endowment is doing is they’re accelerating that process,” said Dr. Connie Guille, director of the Women’s Reproductive Behavioral Health Division at MUSC. “We’ve found something that’s working well, so we want to see how it’s going to work in the real world, and do that quickly.”
The program expansion will include Prisma Health and Spartanburg Regional Health systems in the Upstate, with North Carolina coverage through Atrium Health Wake Forest, ECU Health, and Cape Fear Valley Health System. A Technical Assistance and Training Center will operate at MUSC and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. From 2018-2022, South Carolina had the eighth-worst maternal mortality rate, reaching 47.2 per 100,000 live births in 2021, with the rate for Black women nearly double at 71.7. Recent data shows the overall rate dropped 38% from 2021 to 29.5 per 100,000, ranking South Carolina 12th-worst among states by 2023.
Inadequate mental health treatment and substance use disorder was the top cause of maternal deaths from 2018-2023, resulting in nearly 14% of all deaths. Rural counties still have 68% higher maternal mortality compared to urban counties, and 15 rural counties lack an OB/GYN provider. Guille emphasized the text-based approach: “Just trying to make care much more accessible to people and trying to identify things much earlier, before they become a bigger problem.”
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/local_state_news/texting-mamas-13-million-grant-fuels-expansion-sc-nc/article_1e821b30-bd1c-4494-a1ec-8e1be4b88deb.html