There's Matria the Company and then there is Matria the Brand

While the Disease Management Care Blog gets settled in at the World Health Care Congress, it’s been updating itself about Matria. Mixed in among the stock price news and other corporate happenings are interesting alerts from mom-blogs and pregnancy bulletin boards that mention the company by name. Amidst all the references to cerclage, hyperemesis and terbutaline, they tell a compelling and under-recognized story about the role of disease management in supporting pregnant women at home. They also suggest Matria's brand in this corner of population-based care may be significant.

Top line revenue from a payor for pregnancy home support: good
Meaningful clinical & financial outcomes: important
Anecdotes from moms to be: priceless.

'I still felt crappy, but at that point, I wasn't feeling any worse than I'd felt all night, so I decided to wait to call Matria until it turned over from After-hours to the local center, so that I had a higher likelihood of talking with a nurse who knew me. At 8:30 I called over there and spoke with a nurse who, as it happened, I'd never spoken with before. She suggested giving myself an extra bolus, but also said that she'd recommend contacting the doctor, since this was a change from the norm for me. So she paged the doctor for me. '

'At this point they suggested something called a Zofran pump. I was totally freaked out to get this and dreaded having something attached to me at all times. A company called Matria sends a nurse to your home and hooks you up. I had to put a needle in my thigh and hook up a syringe - the syringe went in a tiny contraption (the size of a remote) that slowly administers the medicine throughout the day. '

'I was on Matria's service and I credit it and their amazing staff with helping me get to 31 weeks of my pregnancy and giving my daughters a fighting chance. I was regularly impressed with this service and its staff and at times, felt they were more dependable than my own OB. I feel so strongly about Matria that I booked a FL Matria rep on a South FL news program (I'm a publicist) for free just to help promote this wonderful company.'

'It takes a while for your body to absorb so you have to massage the area a bit. Ask your doctor if he works with MATRIA, that's who managed my home monitoring for contractions and they would send out a nurse to come out weekly to monitor the baby and give me the shots at home.'