Efficacy of a culturally-sensitive telehealth platform in fostering community-based care coordination for respectful maternal mental health

Project Summary The United States spends more money per capita on maternal and child healthcare than any other industrialized nation, yet maternal and fetal mortality rates are increasing, with non-Hispanic Black women disproportionately affected. The causes of these disparities are multifactorial, including social determinants of health and healthcare-related factors. InovCares is a telehealth platform that offers collaborative mobile apps for patient education, connects patients to culturally sensitive integrated care teams, and promotes the development of support groups to address the maternal health crisis. InovCares leverages HIPAA compliant NASA-patented technology and AI videography to deliver personalized primary and specialized care services. The platform offers video conferencing, phone calls, and text messaging to connect patients to providers, as well as prescription delivery, and telemonitoring capabilities. The platform has already conducted over 10,000 virtual telehealth consultations and an initial trial showed significant clinical improvement in symptoms of depression. InovCares digital health platform provides pregnant women with access to quality medical care and reduces racial disparities in maternal health. The objective of this STTR Phase I is to evaluate effectiveness of InovCares’ culturally tailored maternal mental health program, which includes cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), interpersonal therapy and compassion-focused therapy (CFT) along with peer-to-peer support and gamification of healthy behavioral changes. AIM 1: Assess the efficacy of the InovCares platform in mitigating stress, decreasing depressive symptoms, and improving sleep quality among Black expecting mothers, ascertaining the cumulative impact of optimizing the aforementioned variables on healthy gestational blood pressure. Hypothesis 1: Utilization of the InovCares platform successfully conduces lower stress levels, depressive symptoms, and improved sleep to 7-8 hours per day, resulting in improved blood pressure readings in Black pregnant women when controlling for sociodemographic factors, country of origin, age and lifetime traumatic exposure. This will involve evaluating the efficacy of Health Tribe (peer-to-peer support) participation in combination with receipt of recommendations based on the Health Risk Report. Successful completion of the Phase I objective will provide proof-of-concept for the ability of InovCares health assessment tool to identify risk factors to enable behavioral modifications. Additional development of this technology in Phase II will involve assessing its feasibility to integrate with teleultrasound for the timely detection of conditions that may compromise fetal health.