Right-Sizing Prenatal Care to Meet Patients' Needs and Improve Maternity Care Value.

Prenatal care is one of the most widely used preventive care services in the United States, yet prenatal care delivery recommendations have remained largely unchanged since just before World War II. The current prenatal care model can be improved to better serve modern patients and the health care providers who care for them in three key ways: 1) focusing more on promotion of health and wellness as opposed to primarily focusing on medical complications, 2) flexibly incorporating patient preferences, and 3) individualizing care. As key policymakers and stakeholders grapple with higher maternity care costs and poorer outcomes, including lagging access, equity, and maternal and infant morbidity and mortality in the United States compared with other high-income countries, the opportunity to improve prenatal care has been given insufficient attention.

A Multisite Examination of Everyday Discrimination and the Prevalence of Spontaneous Preterm Birth in African American and Latina Women in the United States.

Objective: African American women have a higher risk of spontaneous preterm birth than White and Latina women. Although Latina women are exposed to similar social determinants of health, they have lower rates of spontaneous preterm birth. One theory for this difference is the maternal stress biological pathway, whereby lifetime stressors, such as racial discrimination, lead to a premature activation of parturition.

The Association between Travel Time and Prenatal Care Attendance.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the association between a patient's travel time to clinic and her prenatal care attendance.

Study Design: We conducted a retrospective cohort study of women (≥18 years) who received prenatal care and delivered at North Carolina Women's Hospital between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2016 ( = 2,808 women, 24,021 appointments). We queried demographic data from the electronic medical record and calculated travel time with ArcGIS.

Genome-scale metabolic network analysis of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major life-threatening opportunistic pathogen that commonly infects immunocompromised patients. This bacterium owes its success as a pathogen largely to its metabolic versatility and flexibility. A thorough understanding of P.