App aims to improve health care for Black and brown mothers in Pittsburgh and beyond
Sometimes raw numbers are so startling that they require immediate attention and action. For example, take the national and local statistics about birthing outcomes for Black women.
The risk of pregnancy-related deaths is three or four times higher for Black women than for white women in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Pennsylvania, Black women made up only 14% of births from 2013 to 2018 but also accounted for 23% of pregnancy-associated deaths inthat time period, according to data from the state Departmentof Health.
The mortality rate for Black women during births is higher in Pittsburgh than in 97% of comparably sized cities, said Kimberly Seals Allers, an award-winning journalist, author, and maternal and infant health strategist who lives in Queens, New York City.
“What we have to acknowledge is that what we have been doing hasn’t been working,” Ms. Seals Allers told the Post-Gazette. “When we look at numbers of this level and a problem that has become obviously deeply entrenched, it calls on all of us to start thinking outside the box and talk about what haven’t we done in this area. We can’t keep doing the same thing and ignoring the people being literally killed by this system.”
Her latest effort to help solve this problem that continues to plague Black and brown women is the recently launched Irth app, which comes with the tagline “birth, but we dropped the ‘B’ for bias.” The app, available nationwide, is designed to serve as a Yelp-like hub of “prenatal, birthing, postpartum and pediatric reviews of care from other Black and brown women,” according to the description on Irth’s website.
Basically, the app is designed to hold hospitals and physicians accountable for how they treat new and expectant Black and brown mothers and eventually turn those qualitative experiences into quantitative evidence of how those entities can improve the care they give to this especially vulnerable population.
“We need more transparency and accountability in this field,” Ms. Seals Allers said. “That is one thing that has not happened at all. Hospitals have been allowed to hide data ... and we have no ideahow someone rated care with a particular doctor or hospital. It’s unacceptable, particularly in 2021 with how we use technology to better inform people across the board.”
The former Fortune magazine writer and Essence senior editor has been using her platform to advocate for solutions in this realm for a while now. She’s written five books on maternal and infant health, starting with 2005’ s NAACP Image Award-nominated “The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy.” She also hosts the “Birthright” podcast that highlights “positive Black birth stories.”
Irth was a project that she developed out of Narrative Nation, her nonprofit that designs media and technology to help combat health disparities. She said she initially wanted to create some sort of story bank after being inundated with “stories of Black women dying or nearly dying, and nobody was listening.” However, her tech-savvy son helped her turn the concept into what eventually became the Irth app.
The app is available for free via Google Play and Apple’s app stores. Before making Irth publicly available, Ms. Seals Allers piloted it in New York City, Detroit, Sacramento, New Orleans and Washington, D.C., to ensure it would launch with at least some reviews already available. Since expanding nationally, Irth has chosen a few other focus cities, beginning with Atlanta and now Pittsburgh.
“We are a national app, but we try to focus on places where the disparities are great,” she said. “Unfortunately, Pittsburgh fits our profile.”
A few weeks ago, she hosted an informational webinar in Pittsburgh that attracted about 50 attendees to explain Irth’s mission. She also recently participated in a panel discussion about postpartum depression as part of comedian and activist Angelina Spicer’s event at Sewickley’s Tull Family Theater, and she has talked with the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, Healthy Start Inc. and the Allegheny County Breastfeeding Coalition about “ways that Irth can be a tool for improving birth outcomesin Pittsburgh.”
An app like this coincides with the work of Jessica Devido, an associate professor at Duquesne University who holds a doctorate in nursing. The former labor and delivery nurse was recently selected as a 2021 Macy Faculty Scholar, and through that program for medicine and nursing educators, she will be developing a Maternal Child Health Equity Fellowship for pre-licensure nursing undergraduate students.
Ms. Devido said that over the past 20 years, maternal morbidity and mortality has increased in the U.S. “at a rate of change that is alarming.” It’s been especially concerning for Black and brown women, and “the gap widens even further” zooming in on those groups’ birthing outcomes in both Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh specifically.
She hopes her fellowship will educate prospective health care professionals in how to “be prepared for all dimensions of maternal child health” and “improve students’ knowledge of equity.” Something like Irth is exactly the sort of thing she wants to see more of in Pittsburgh.
“Women have to feel comfortable entering into a health care relationship,” she said. “I think that it’s imperative that apps and other support services and structures are designed to support confident decision-making around women’s health and the health of their children. I think this is an excellent resource that’s being developed and made available, and I look forward to its successes.”
Ms. Seals Allers would like Irth to grow into the primary source hospitals and health care organizations turn to for “tracking and accountability for their own anti-bias efforts.” It could ultimately incentivize doctors to do better when caring for Black and brown mothers before and after their pregnancies.
“Your experiences have power,” she said. “This system has done a great job of telling us we don’t matter, and our experiences will be dismissed. I promise you your experiences matter, and we will use the experiences we collect in Pittsburgh to push for change.”