Abstract
Approximately half of rural counties lack a hospital with labor and delivery services, and rural mothers and infants face poorer health outcomes as a result. For hospitals that do provide labor and delivery services, maternity quality measures can help track measurable outcomes and processes in order to improve patient care. In this brief, the FMT describes characteristics of Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) with and without labor and delivery services, and then describes CAH reporting and performance on five key quality measures related to maternity care and birth outcomes. Overall, we found that 30.6% of CAHs provide labor and delivery services, with no statistically significant differences among these CAHs by system ownership. CAHs located in the South were less likely to have labor and delivery compared to CAHs located in other census regions. Some statistically significant differences in reporting of maternity care quality measures by Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendor emerged, including CAHs using Epic being more likely to report the maternal morbidity structural measure and CAHs using CPSI/Evident being more likely to report PC-05 (exclusive breast milk feeding). Performance across maternity care measures did not vary based on annual Emergency Department (ED) volume or annual births, suggesting that low-volume CAHs are performing as well as other CAHs on these measures.