Case Study: State’s Health and Medicaid Department achieves earlier pregnancy identification and reduced infant mortality with Optum EDW

How data is helping improve one state’s infant health program

State’s Health and Medicaid Department faced a persistent maternal and infant health crisis—the state had the eighth-highest infant mortality rate in 2017 (7.5 deaths per 1,000 births)—and needed a fast, reliable way to identify pregnant Medicaid enrollees early so they could be connected to local supports and home‑visiting services. To meet this time‑sensitive requirement and to predict outreach volumes for call‑center staffing, the state engaged Optum, which already operated its enterprise data warehouse (EDW).

Optum used the EDW to combine four streams—Medicaid applications, claims, eligibility and real‑time lab data from the state HIE—implemented deduplication and produced MCE performance reports to coordinate outreach. Optum now identifies roughly 10–15 eligible pregnant women per day and, since the program began, has helped surface about 75,000 women (≈half eligible), with roughly 25,500 contacted and about half of those referred to services; the state’s infant mortality rate declined about 15% from 2017 to 2020.