The Dallas-based Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) has launched a new maternal health early-warning dashboard to help combat North Texas’ maternal health crisis.

The Maternal Outcomes Monitoring System (MOMS) dashboard is a predictive data tool designed to support the North Texas Maternal Health Accelerator (MHA), a community-wide initiative led by Texas Christian University and UT Southwestern Medical Center in tackling some of the country’s worst maternal health outcomes in Dallas and Tarrant counties.
 
The nonprofit PCCI notes that North Texas has endured exceptionally high rates of severe maternal complications, with Tarrant County, for example, recording an estimated 48 maternal deaths per 100,000 births. The new MOMS dashboard serves as a community-level early warning system: it forecasts surges in severe obstetric complications (SOC) and neonatal intensive care (NICU) admissions up to 12 months in advance, mapped down to the ZIP Code and census tract level. Armed with this hyper-local foresight, healthcare providers, MHA partners, policymakers, and community organizations can proactively direct resources to the neighborhoods where mothers and babies are most at risk, before crises occur.
 
PCCI is a data science partner for the MHA program, bringing to the effort its experience with AI-driven programs that support expectant mothers and expertise in Non-Medical Drivers of Health (NMDoH). The MOMS dashboard builds on that foundation by combining clinical and community data into a single, actionable index. It integrates multiple data sources including medical factors derived from the DFW Hospital Foundation data, as well as NMDoH such as neighborhood stability, unemployment levels, transportation access, and health literacy challenges from PCCI’s Community Vulnerability Compass.

In an interview with Healthcare Innovation in February 2026, PCCI President and CEO Steve Miff, Ph.D., noted that the predictive model was model was built based on earlier work done on a diabetes surveillance system. “The diabetes model predicts deterioration that will require ED visits  and hospitalization 12 months out. It's at the neighborhood level, and it gives you both the medical issues that are driving that prediction and the non-medical drivers, and it ranks them, and it's very dynamic,” Miff said. 

Miff also spoke about a pre-term birth prevention program. “We’re modeling with data from a local source that's called the DFW Hospital Foundation, where we have close to 100% of all pregnancies that occur across the two counties and the associated series of study complications,” he explained. “So we're able to geocode and model those to understand where the highest density of these serious septic complications occur, and what is the makeup of those neighborhoods. One of the intervention is iron distribution to be able to give pregnant women iron very early in the pregnancy. We are using this to identify locations where the iron distributions take place.”
 
By revealing where clinical risks intersect with social vulnerabilities, the MOMS dashboard highlights “hot spots” that might otherwise be overlooked. For instance, it can flag a neighborhood where high rates of hypertension and poor past birth outcomes coincide with limited prenatal care access or economic instability.
 
This kind of insight allows MHA partners to tailor interventions to each community’s needs, whether that means accelerating distribution of iron supplements, deploying mobile prenatal clinics, expanding telehealth for at-risk ZIP Codes, or bolstering social support in areas with high poverty and low health literacy. Ultimately, the goal is to educate the community and use data to drive targeted, collaborative action that can reduce severe complications and improve maternal and newborn outcomes across North Texas.

In a statement, Stuart Flynn, M.D., a co-lead of the North Texas MHA and Founding Dean of TCU’s Burnett School of Medicine, emphasized the importance of collaboration around these insights. “North Texas has some of the most alarming maternal health statistics in the nation and we simply cannot accept that,” he said. “This new dashboard lets us spot maternal health disparities in real time and pinpoint the communities in greatest need. It’s an invaluable tool for clinicians, public health experts, and community leaders alike. With the right data in hand, we can align our efforts, target interventions, and truly save lives. This is what collaboration and data-driven action looks like: working together, armed with smart insights, to turn the tide on our maternal health crisis.”

The MOMS dashboard will be publicly accessible via an online portal, offering all MHA partners and North Texas communities timely, reliable data to inform health strategy, research, and public policy decisions. Planners anticipate that local health agencies, hospitals, nonprofits, and policymakers will use the tool to track neighborhood-level trends and measure the impact of interventions over time. The North Texas MHA’s overarching mission is to dramatically improve maternal outcomes in the region, and the launch of this advanced dashboard marks a significant step toward that goal.