It’s Time for Technology to Lift Maternal Care
It’s Time for Technology to Lift Maternal Care
https://medcitynews.com/2026/06/its-time-for-technology-to-lift-maternal-care/
Publish Date: 2026-06-07 09:27:00
Source Domain: medcitynews.com
In 15 years of working in women’s health, I’ve come to know that labor and delivery (L&D) clinicians and providers are some of the most committed caregivers in existence, but increasingly the most hamstrung by market forces and inadequate systems. We must lean on emerging technologies to augment care and fill dangerous gaps that are all too human.
It is not the obvious, dramatic saves that show these gaps in care. A rapidly deteriorating obstetric emergency is not difficult to recognize. In most cases, it does not go unnoticed – teams mobilize quickly, moving with speed and purpose to protect both mother and baby.
But that’s not how most adverse outcomes in childbirth develop.
More often, risk builds gradually, often unnoticed. Subtle, evolving fetal heart rate changes such as decreasing variability, increasing baseline, and increasing frequency, depth, and duration of decelerations – in isolation not concerning, but in aggregate a threat to the fetus. These warning signs are easy to overlook in the moment, but accumulate until the pattern becomes unmistakable and threatening. By then, the window to intervene may have narrowed or closed. It is in recognizing these small but compounding warning signs – signs which humans are not well equipped to track over time – where technology must do the heavy lifting.
Designing devices to counter a worsening trajectory in maternal care
The underlying dynamics of maternal care are in a critical state. Labor and delivery units are closing across the country, severely diminishing access to care. Experienced nurses are being replaced by less tenured staff and attrition among veteran providers is on the rise. Patients are older and present with more comorbidities. Longstanding disparities continue to put women of color at significantly higher risk.
These pressures are converging in real time at the bedside — and many of the tools meant to support care have not kept pace. Technologies…
