July 28, 2025- The American Hospital Association (AHA) and health care technology company Epic are collaborating to help more hospitals consider adopting a set of tools to aid in the detection and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) — a serious and potentially life-threatening complication of childbirth.
PPH is responsible for 11% of maternal deaths in the United States and notably 40% of all such hemorrhages occur in patients without any risk factors. Point-of-care tools in the electronic health record (EHR) can help health care providers prevent, detect and treat PPH, ultimately saving lives and improving care for mothers across America.
The PPH toolkit, available to users of Epic’s Stork Obstetrics Information System, includes methods of assessing a mother’s risk of hemorrhage, a mechanism to continuously refresh risk assessments throughout the childbirth and postpartum period, embedded guides to support clinical decision-making within clearly defined risk categories, and facilitate treatment of an acute hemorrhage, all within a clinician’s obstetric workflow. With the proper permissions from applicable content providers, users of any EHR should be able to implement a similar set of tools.