Patient navigators lifted postpartum care visits to 96% from 80% in a 405-patient trial

Bilingual navigators who booked appointments, arranged rides and found childcare got 96% of the mothers they worked with to a postpartum visit, compared with 80% of mothers who received standard care. The trial, led by Dr. Lynn Yee of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, enrolled 405 low-income pregnant patients at Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago between 2020 and 2024 and appeared in JAMA Health Forum on Oct. 2, 2026.

Yee described the problem the navigators were hired to solve in plain terms: pregnancy and the postpartum period are complicated, and many people do not get the care they need in a fragmented health system. The trial tested whether a person assigned to smooth those gaps, rather than a handout of referrals, would change what mothers actually did in the weeks and months after birth.

Randomized Design at Prentice Women’s Hospital

The study is Navigating New Motherhood 2, a randomized controlled trial sponsored by Northwestern. According to its trial registry listing, 405 pregnant or postpartum women were assigned 1:1 to a navigation program or to standard care, and the National Institutes of Health funded it through grant 1R01HD098178. Enrollment was suspended in March 2020 when COVID-19 forced the study to move to telehealth services, then resumed in June 2020, so the four-year window includes patients enrolled before, during and after the first pandemic spring. The registry lists the primary outcomes as a composite of clinical measures at 4 to 12 weeks postpartum, among them retention in care, family planning uptake, depression screening, breastfeeding status and vaccinations, with follow-up again at 11 to 13 months.

The release from Northwestern, distributed through EurekAlert, credits the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with the funding and calls the work the first large-scale evaluation of patient navigation in obstetric care.

Bilingual Navigators and Their Tasks

Navigators were trained staff who spoke English and Spanish. They built a postpartum care plan with each patient, scheduled the appointments in it, coordinated transportation and childcare, improved health literacy, and relayed information between patients and their medical teams. One of them, Viridiana Carmona-Barrera, is named in Northwestern’s materials for coordinating transportation and childcare for patients facing those barriers. Those two logistics, a ride to the clinic and someone to watch a newborn or older children for an hour, are the kind of practical obstacles that a clinic’s reminder call cannot remove.

Patient navigation is borrowed from cancer care, where a navigator walks a patient through a maze of tests and referrals. The Northwestern group first tried the idea in postpartum care in 2015 and 2016, in a smaller pilot of 152 navigated patients compared with 159 historical controls. That pilot, published in 2019 in AJP Reports, targeted postpartum weight retention and did not significantly reduce it: mean retention was 4.0 kg in the navigated group against 2.7 kg in controls.

The 2026 trial changed the target from weight to getting mothers back into the health system at all.

Visit Rates and Screening Results

Attendance at the postpartum visit separated the groups most cleanly, 96% with a navigator and 80% without, and the primary-care gap at one year was wider in relative terms. The gaps carried through a range of other measures. News-Medical’s summary of the paper lists depression screening at 86% versus 72%, use of the family planning method patients wanted at 65% versus 43%, and blood pressure screening at 85% versus 62%.

Lipid testing reached 28% of navigated patients and 13% of the others, and glucose testing reached 31% versus 16%. At one year, 57% of the navigator group had seen a primary care clinician, against 30% of the standard-care group. Northwestern’s release says the program was designed to build patients’ independence so they could navigate the health system confidently without ongoing support.

Blood pressure screening carries weight for a reason beyond routine. In the CDC’s Vital Signs analysis of pregnancy-related deaths from 2011 to 2015, 21.4% of deaths occurred 7 to 42 days after delivery and another 11.7% between 43 days and a year, and the CDC reported that about three in five pregnancy-related deaths were preventable. Among causes in the first six days postpartum, the agency listed hemorrhage, infection and hypertensive disorders.

A missed postpartum visit is therefore the point at which a rising blood pressure goes unread. The Northwestern numbers measure attendance and screening, not deaths or hospital readmissions, and the trial reports them for low-income patients at one Chicago hospital rather than for all new mothers. The News-Medical summary frames the result as groundwork for future research and for potential Medicaid funding of navigation, a payment question the trial itself does not settle. The percentages in the release stand as the trial’s outcomes; the JAMA Health Forum article carries the full statistical tables.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview