Cross-border Prenatal Care Utilization: Using Design Thinking to Drive Improvements in Birth Data Quality

A TECHNICAL BRIEF on the California Initiative of the Border States CoIIN

n 2018, a team of stakeholders collaborating through the Border States CoIIN Initiative (see next section) convened in Imperial County, California, to employ human centered design methods in building a shared understanding around the factors that contribute to low rates of early prenatal care in the area. The team hypothesized that variation in practices or policies that determine how foreign prenatal care is recorded may result in skewed vital statistics data around early and adequate prenatal care for the region as a whole. This is important because we rely on vital statistics to help us understand quality of and access to medical care, and racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in maternal and infant care within our communities, as well as to design targeted public health interventions.