In the news this week, recent events have put a spotlight on the inequities in maternal healthcare. While new evidence shows how COVID-19 has widened racial disparities in maternal health, policy-makers and researchers are also looking at the effect of opioid use and structural racism on maternal outcomes. 

The recent protests for racial justice and equality have put a much needed spotlight on the inequities that exist in our healthcare system. Coupled with the pandemic, they are driving important conversations about the ways in which technology can be used to improve outcomes for the vulnerable, especially low-income and minority populations. Plus, as the world emerges from lockdown, reimbursement questions resurface as practices consider long term plans for virtual care solutions. 

Our nation is in a state of crisis, and it is not the crisis that we think. It is a crisis of disease — not an uncontrollable virus that takes lives indiscriminately, but an internal disorder that is deeply embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives and operates on prejudice and hate. The deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others enrage and grieve us, both for what they are and for what they represent — not a tragic aberration but a systematic failure to protect the equality that our country professes to uphold. 

On February 13, 2019, Babyscripts’ Senior Product Manager Christie H. Lee joined Huge, the Jennifer Bush-Lawson Foundation, Duke in DC and other leading organizations to discuss maternal mortality, how it affects low-income women and women of color in particular, and the push to disrupt this growing crisis through local and national innovation.