Women’s Health Month arrives at a pivotal moment for healthcare systems across the United States. This year’s Women’s Health Week theme, “Prevention, Innovation, and Impact: A New Era in Women’s Health”, reflects a growing recognition that improving outcomes for women, especially mothers, requires more than incremental change. It demands connected systems, smarter use of data, and coordinated action across the entire continuum of care. 

Maternal health sits at the center of this transformation. Despite advances in clinical care, the United States continues to face persistent challenges in maternal outcomes, many of them driven by fragmented systems, delayed risk identification, and gaps in follow-up care. National Women’s Health Week priorities, including prevention, expanded access, and reducing health disparities, underscore the urgency of addressing these systemic barriers.  

 Across the country, healthcare organizations are exploring new models to close these gaps. In Ohio, a collaboration between Azara Healthcare, the Ohio Association of Community Health Centers and its member health centers, CareSource, Humana, the Ohio Department of Medicaid, and The Ohio College of Medicine Government Resource Center, is demonstrating how interoperable data infrastructure and coordinated workflows can improve maternal care delivery at scale.  

Closing Gaps Before they Become Crises 

Effective prevention in maternal health depends on more than clinical screenings. It requires timely visibility into patient risk and the ability to keep pregnant and postpartum patients connected to care throughout their healthcare journey.

In Ohio, one of the most significant barriers to prevention was a fragmented and manually burdensome pregnancy risk assessment process. Pregnancy Risk Assessment Forms (PRAFs), which help identify high-risk pregnancies and connect patients to appropriate support services, were often not completed, delayed or never submitted once completed. As a result, only about 30% of PRAFs were being completed statewide, limiting visibility into many Medicaid-covered pregnancies and delaying opportunities for early intervention.

This challenge is not unique to Ohio. In addition to national shortages of maternal health care providers, providers frequently struggle with fragmented workflows, limited visibility across care teams, and inconsistent follow-up processes. Even when clinicians know what care is needed, they may lack reliable systems to identify patients who miss prenatal visits, overdue screenings, or postpartum follow-up appointments.

Without connected data and coordinated outreach, small gaps in care can quickly become high-risk events.

Prevention becomes possible when healthcare organizations can operationalize data effectively. By creating a stronger data foundation for pregnancy risk assessments, patient engagement, and care coordination, providers can proactively identify high-risk pregnancies, patients who miss prenatal appointments, individuals without scheduled follow-up visits, and postpartum patients in need of continued care.

This type of visibility allows care teams to intervene earlier, improve continuity of care, and reduce the likelihood of adverse infant and maternal outcomes.

Transforming Workflows Through Interoperability

To address these challenges, Azara Healthcare collaborated with healthcare organizations, payers, and state agencies across Ohio to modernize and automate the PRAF process through interoperable population health technology.

Rather than requiring providers to adopt entirely new workflows, Azara Healthcare expanded the Ohio Data Integration Platform (ODIP) to automate the creation of electronic Pregnancy Risk Assessment Forms (ePRAFs) using data already documented during routine clinical care. By mapping and aggregating required data elements across multiple EHR systems used by community health centers statewide, the platform enabled PRAFs to be prepopulated and securely transmitted to state systems through a consistent, scalable reporting process. This approach reduced administrative burden, streamlined provider workflows, improved reporting consistency, while enabling earlier identification of high-risk pregnancies.

The initiative reflects a broader shift happening across women’s healthcare today: innovation is no longer defined solely by new clinical tools, but by how effectively systems identify those at risk and communicate and coordinate care.

Interoperability plays a critical role in this transformation. When healthcare organizations, payers, and community partners can securely share and act on timely data, care teams gain the visibility needed to improve preventive care, strengthen postpartum engagement, and reduce fragmentation across the maternal health continuum.

Turning Coordination Into Better Outcomes

The Ohio initiative was awarded a 2026 KLAS Points of Light Case Study titled, Improving Maternal Health in Ohio via Interoperability & Incentivized Care, as it highlights how operational coordination and connected infrastructure can lead to meaningful impact on maternal care.

The results of the Ohio collaboration demonstrate how connected systems and streamlined workflows can translate into measurable impact.

Following implementation:

• PRAF submission rates increased from approximately 30% to more than 80%, significantly improving early identification of high-risk pregnancies
• Automated workflows reduced provider burden and shortened submission time from 15–20 minutes to just a few minutes
• Continuity of Medicaid coverage improved throughout pregnancy and postpartum care
• Early indicators are showing improvements in maternal and infant health outcomes across the state

These outcomes reinforce a critical point: technology alone does not improve maternal health. Impact comes from using technology to strengthen coordination, improve visibility, and enable earlier intervention across the care continuum.

A New Era in Women's Health

The future of women’s health will be shaped by the ability of healthcare organizations to connect data, simplify workflows, and support patients across the full continuum of care, not only during pregnancy and postpartum care, but throughout the course of their lives.

That continuum begins well before pregnancy, with preventive and upstream interventions that help identify risk factors early, improve access to care, and support healthier outcomes before maternal health concerns arise. It extends into long-term women’s health needs, including chronic condition management, preventive screenings, and menopause care.

The work happening across Ohio offers a clear example of what this future can look like. By equipping providers, payers, and community organizations with interoperable systems and actionable data, healthcare organizations can deliver more connected, proactive, and equitable care at every stage of life.

> Read the case study