Peiyin Hung
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Pregnant and postpartum women in rural areas face higher rates of serious complications and death, often because obstetric care is far away or hard to reach. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted maternity care and prompted sudden, state-by-state changes in telehealth rules.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
maternal health
perinatal care
telehealth
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Measure how the COVID-19 pandemic changed maternal care access, quality and maternal and birth outcomes across maternal characteristics, using N3C electronic health records and South Carolina and Florida statewide data.
- Test whether perinatal telehealth uptake reduced pandemic-related differences in maternal care access, quality and outcomes, using multilevel imputation and Bayesian methods on linked real-world data.
- Assess how state telehealth policies, such as reimbursement for store-and-forward services, remote patient monitoring and provider expansion, relate to perinatal telehealth uptake.
- Build a stochastic simulation model that predicts long-term maternal care access, quality, outcomes and expenditures with and without each state telehealth policy.
More about the research
Telehealth includes video visits, messages sent and reviewed later, and remote monitoring of patients at home. These rule changes created a natural experiment: a chance to see whether telehealth can close gaps in maternal care. Self-reports suggest telehealth use rose sharply, but little real-world data show who used it or whether it helped.
Why it matters
Rural and other underserved pregnant and postpartum women could benefit from clearer evidence about which telehealth approaches and state policies improve their access to care and their health. Projections of long-term outcomes and maternity care costs under different telehealth policies could help state policymakers and health systems choose rules that expand timely, high-quality perinatal care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Susan Perez
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine whether a multifaceted patient-centered maternity care intervention improves hospital maternal outcomes and patient satisfaction, compared with remote self-paced training alone, in a cluster randomized trial across 9 Ochsner hospitals.
Jean Guglielminotti
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the 2010 ACA Dependent Coverage Provision, which expanded private insurance to people under 26, is associated with lower severe maternal morbidity during childbirth, using Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project data.
Steffani Bailey
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine rates of opioid use disorder care — diagnosis, buprenorphine and other medication orders, retention on medication, and behavioral health visits — before, during, and after telehealth expansion, using nearly a decade of OCHIN electronic health record data from community health centers in 35 states.
The school
University of South Carolina-Columbia: 22 labs on PI Pages, $277M a year on research, 425 research doctorates a year.
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