Quality improvement program cuts medically unnecessary scheduled births

Four years ago, a group called the Ohio Perinatal Quality Collaborative brought together 20 hospitals across the state to try and address the issue of scheduling deliveries early when there is no medical need. All the hospitals were asked to collect information on scheduled births and to submit it to a common database, so the hospitals could compare their performance to the others. During the first four months of the study, for instance, there were 145 more unnecessary deliveries scheduled than during the last four months of the study. This translated to a steady drop in these births from about seven percent of all deliveries at the beginning of the study to about three percent at the end.