State proposes home visiting expansion and regional perinatal centers to shore up rural maternal care

The Department of Public Health and the Department of Community Health presented a package of maternal and child health proposals to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health that would expand home visiting services and strengthen regional perinatal centers to serve rural Georgia.

The agencies told the subcommittee that newborn and maternal outcomes in Georgia remain a concern and that investments should treat maternal and infant health as a dyad. The governor's recommendations include expanding the existing home visiting program from 50 counties to 75 counties and modest state funding for a coordinated network of perinatal centers with telehealth-equipped hub-and-spoke links to local health departments. "We need to look at that as a dyad because a healthy mother is required to have a healthy baby," the Department of Public Health presenter said.

Why it matters: Committee members were shown that 15 hospitals have closed labor-and-delivery services in recent years, leaving long travel distances for high-risk patients in parts of South Georgia and other rural communities. The perinatal centers plan aims to use telehealth and itinerant specialist technologists to let local clinics and health departments perform fetal sonograms, EKGs and blood-pressure monitoring with remote maternal-fetal medicine oversight; in-person referral and transport would be used only when necessary. The agencies said the proposed perinatal funding is under $1 million in state dollars but is expected to draw federal matches.

Details and context: The proposal includes: - Expansion of home visiting programs to additional counties (DPH said Chatham and Bibb are targeted as new locations and Columbus already has a McVee program). The agencies distributed a flyer summarizing the program's early impacts. - Perinatal center investments: funding to support telehealth equipment in local health departments, increased staffing/consulting at 5 regional perinatal centers outside Metro Atlanta, and travel/itinerant technician support so that specialists can remotely supervise testing performed locally. - Small capital requests for aged district offices and public health laboratories in Albany, Waycross, Rome and Decatur to support field operations and lab capacity.

What the presenters said about benefits and limits: DPH stressed the approach is intended to increase access and avoid emergency deliveries at nonmaternity facilities by enabling early triage and coordinated transport. Officials said the proposed state expenditure is relatively small and intended to be leveraged by federal match and by existing local clinical partners. The agencies acknowledged that workforce shortages, reimbursement issues and liability concerns all contributed to prior labor-and-delivery closures and that investment alone will not fully resolve workforce recruitment challenges.

Next steps: The subcommittee posed follow-up questions; the presenters asked for legislative support for the budget lines and said they would return with further implementation details during committee consideration.