In addition to sustained job growth, recent expansions at area hospitals include the South Tower extension at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Medical Center and the Healing Tower floor expansion in Houston Methodist The Woodlands Hospital to accommodate needs in heart health, OB/GYN services and mental health.
New devices and cardiovascular health awareness programs for women, as well as additional resources for mothers are some of the local initiatives. Efforts to hire more female providers and care professionals are also among top priorities to address women’s needs in the health care system.
“We’re slowly figuring out that women react differently, whether it’s our bodies or our minds,” said Dr. Elizabeth Moiser, a specialist of obstetrics and gynecology for Houston Methodist. “We need to have more focus on women and all of those areas of mental health, physical health and medication management.”
Mental well-being
In January 2022, Houston Methodist completed a $250 million expansion that included doubling the labor and delivery bed capacity of The Woodlands facility from 106 to 212 to keep up with rising birth rates. According to available data, Houston Methodist recorded a 19% increase in deliveries in The Woodlands from 2021-22.
However, as more mothers went through the system, doctors have also started focusing on treating depression and anxiety among women, Moiser said. Postpartum depression can be a severe and long-lasting condition affecting women’s ability to care for themselves and their families, and a majority of cases go unnoticed or untreated due to a lack of resources for mothers.
“The OB/GYN would find it—you know whenever they were weeks or months out—and then they don’t come back to us, and we thought, ‘Well, how do we hit it on the front end?’” said Moiser, who has also worked as a labor and delivery nurse.
Houston Methodist hired a licensed clinical maternal health social worker in early 2023 to conduct screenings for women who have given birth, are pregnant or are planning to become pregnant, Moiser said. There is also a new system in place that sends texts to mothers reminding them of key appointments and providing check-in opportunities.As a part of maternal care, Moiser said nurses and doctors train and prepare for the worst-case scenarios at multiple stages of maternity. The expansion of delivery rooms provided additional space for physicians and nurses to undergo training drills in a variety of scenarios.
“We run quarterly drills that cover not just hemorrhage but high blood pressure and all other risks,” Moiser said. “We have nurses who come straight out of nursing school, and we put them in that evidence-based practice before they can graduate out of their internship.”
The silent killer
Issues with anxiety, high blood pressure and other common health issues can have an effect not just on maternal health but women’s health as a whole, experts said. Heart health and cancer screening was part of the focus of the $250 million expansion of the South Tower at Memorial Hermann in The Woodlands, which opened in June 2022.
“The major growth in cardiology is in structural and advance heart failure aspects,” said Dr. Ahmad Iqbal, an interventional cardiologist with Memorial Hermann The Woodlands. “Heart exacerbations are the No. 1 reason why patients and the Medicare population get readmitted.”
Iqbal said women make up just over half of the patient population for heart issues, and many contributing factors are symptoms women are not properly screened or treated for, such as high blood pressure, continued emotional stress and even inflammatory issues.
“There’s a constellation of symptoms that all make sense together most of the time, and the primary care will unfortunately have a difficult time trying to verify all those things. So you get people that are unfortunately mismanaged and then misdiagnosed,” Iqbal said.
High blood pressure is one of the many factors that significantly heighten the risk of heart failure and heart dysfunction, Iqbal said.
“We’re definitely seeing a higher acuity of patients,” said Nicole Rodriquez, interim director of women’s services at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands. “Our postpartum hemorrhage is increasing our hypertension and our pregnancy [rates].”
Filling the gap
Area medical experts said to understand the factors putting women at risk for potentially life-threatening issues they must improve research methods and hire more women in the medical field.
“There’s a lot of women researchers researching women, and [there is] growth of the professional women out there who want to research [women’s health],” Moiser said.
According to a study performed in 2021 by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the percent of physicians who are female increased from 28.3% in 2007 to 36.3% in 2020. In 2019, women made up 50.5% of admissions into medical programs for the very first time.
“It’s interdisciplinary, across many different fields, and that is one of the biggest topics we have talked about was many researchers now are becoming more involved in women,” Moiser said.
Officials with local hospital systems said women joining medical professions has spurred a greater focus on women’s health within the medical field. However, the growth needs to occur across the board in all medical professions, not just specialty areas, said Michael Dill, the AAMC’s director of workforce studies.
“We have a good deal more work to do in terms of gender equity,” Dill said in the report. “If the majority of female physicians are still concentrated in a handful of specialties, then we haven’t gotten where we need to be.”
Jason Glover, vice president of operations at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands, said the need for more practitioners in the women’s health sector will be a continued focus for growth among area hospitals.
“As we look forward to the future, women’s services is one of those key items that we know there’s a huge need in this area. So it really rises to the top of the list when we start to think about, ‘Hey, what does our next expansion look like?’” Glover said.
