United by a passion for maternal health. Driven to provide equitable, innovative, and safe systems for postnatal care.
Our Purpose
This project is a transdisciplinary collaboration across UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University, and Ohio State University to transform postnatal care. Our aim is for our work to be inclusive, effective and inspirational. Our vision is to outline, test and redesign systems of postnatal care in partnership with patients and health care team members to better enable all families to thrive.
Our Team
Sana Behnam Asl, MFA
sbehnam@ncsu.edu
Sana is a Ph.D. student in the design department at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include healthcare, user experience, and leveraging emerging technologies for human-centered design.
Joia Adele Crear-Perry, MD, FACOG
drjoia@birthequity.org
Dr. Crear-Perry is the Founder and President of the National Birth Equity Collaborative and Principal at Health Equity Cypher. She is a thought leader around racism as a root cause of health inequities, Speaker, Trainer, Advocate, Policy Expert, and fighter for justice.
Amelia Gibson, MS, PhD angibson@email.unc.edu
Amelia Gibson is an Assistant Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and the Carolina Health Informatics Program. She is interested in health information access and marginalization.
Carolina Gill, MS
cgill2@ncsu.edu
Carolina is an Associate Professor of Industrial Design at North Carolina State University. She provides expertise in design for innovation, visualization and iterative prototyping.
Kimberly Harper, MSN, RN, MHA
kimberly_harper@med.unc.edu
Kimberly is the Perinatal Neonatal Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Maternal and Infant Health in the School of Medicine at the UNC Chapel Hill. She is a registered nurse with expertise in labor and delivery, nursing leadership, and public health home visiting.
Jenny Jensen, BSN, RN, IBCLC
jennyjensen@jhu.edu
Jenny is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and a nurse and board-certified lactation consultant on the postpartum unit at UNC Women’s Hospital.
Raunak Mahtani, MID
rmahtan@ncsu.edu
Raunak is a PhD student of design at North Carolina State University. He is interested in different interdisciplinary perspectives on design, and projects that make a positive social impact.
Anna Rothfuss Matthews, BSN, RN
aerothfu@email.unc.edu
Anna is a postpartum nurse, Hillman Scholar, and PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing. She is interested in health equity for individuals in the perinatal period, particularly around migraine and perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.
Emily Patterson, PhD
patterson.150@osu.edu
Emily is an Associate Professor in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, College of Medicine at The Ohio State University. She is a human factors engineer with research interests in patient safety and informatics.
Karen Sheffield-Abdullah PhD, RN, CNM
ksheffie@email.unc.edu
Karen is a Certified Nurse-Midwife and an Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill School of Nursing. She is particularly interested in developing strategies to reduce the long-term health effects of psychological trauma, anxiety, and depression on women’s health and birth outcomes.
Marina Stranieri Pearsall, MPH, RDN, LDN
mpear@live.unc.edu
Marina is the Project Manager of the Postnatal Patient Safety Learning Lab.
Alison Stuebe, MD, MSc
stuebe@med.unc.edu
Alison is a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the School of Medicine at UNC Chapel Hill and Distinguished Professor of Infant and Young Child Feeding at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her work focuses on developing models for holistic and equitable care of families during the 4th Trimester.
Alison Sweeney, MD aesweene@email.unc.edu
Alison is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatric Hospital Medicine at UNC Chapel Hill. She is also the Medical Director of the Newborn Nursery. Her work and interests focus on Quality Improvement initiatives within the Newborn population.
Kristin Tully, PhD
kristin.tully@unc.edu
Kristin is a Research Assistant Professor in OBGYN and with the Collaborative for Maternal and Infant Health in the School of Medicine at the UNC Chapel Hill. She is a medical anthropologist with expertise in developmental science. She leverages multi-method data integration and stakeholder partnership to establish more humanity in healthcare.
Kelly Umstead, MS, MID
kaumstead@ncsu.edu
Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include identifying unmet needs in healthcare and human-centered design methods.
Shewit Weldense, BSN, RN
shewit17@live.unc.edu
Shewit Weldense is a MSPH student in the department of Health Policy & Management at UNC Chapel Hill and a postpartum nurse at WakeMed North Hospital. Her research interests include improving maternal outcomes for all birthing people by eliminating health disparities.
Defining Priority Areas
Our approach of integrating systems engineering and human-centered design is guided by a deep understanding of clinical needs in postnatal care and the experiences of new mothers.
Using mixed methods, we will analyze current processes and procedures for maternal-infant dyadic evaluation and management during the postnatal unit stay and discharge transition through the lens of mothers, clinicians, EHR data, and other key stakeholders. This work will help us identify numerous areas of opportunity to improve the value and safety of postpartum care
Shadowing, Interviews, Surveys
Our team is prioritizing the voices of birthing parents and their supports through interviews and longitudinal surveys We are centering experiences of marginalized populations so that we can shift clinical care to recognize, accommodate, and celebrate parent-infant needs.
Patterns in EHR Data
Our team is conducting applied machine learning in order to identify early indicators of maternal and infant mortality in the hospital and within 30 days post-partum. We explicitly consider how the ‘couplet dyad’ of the mother and baby can be used to aid prediction, such as by shared risk factors and interactions. We are particularly interested in predicting blood loss in the hospital that is difficult to detect through traditional approaches, such as when blood is pooling internally.
Chart Reviews
We are reviewing patient charts to identify patterns in translation services and contributors to adverse events and close calls. We are particularly interested in identifying opportunities to reduce disparities in care outcomes for vulnerable populations.
Human-Centered Design Workshops
Our team is committed to engaging patients, their support persons, and health care professionals as partners. The purpose of this method is to validate our multi-method findings, fill in gaps in our knowledge, and prioritize directions for action.
Filming
We are partnering with families on the postnatal unit and their health care team members to film within patient rooms for extended periods of time. The purpose is to gain insight the reality of what it is like during the day and night.
Prototyping and Simulation
We believe in creating and evaluating low-fidelity concept prototypes in partnership with healthcare and patient stakeholders using a design-centered approach. From early assessments, we can identify the most promising bundles of interventions to simulate in a laboratory setting with standardized patients to refine the tools to thenimplment and evaluate in postnatal care.
Share your story or partner with us today!
We are listening and learning together. Please get in touch if you are interested in sharing your story or partnering with us.