Maternal-fetal care

Maternal-fetal practitioners care for you during pregnancy, labor and after birth. Their priority is ensuring you and your baby are as healthy as possible throughout the entire experience. They also provide specialized high-risk care as well, should you need it.

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Maternal-fetal medicine in Overland Park, Kansas

High-risk, unborn babies require extra care from a maternal-fetal specialist, also known as a perinatologist.

At the Fetal Heath Center at Overland Park Regional Medical Center, our experts offer specialized tests, monitoring and advanced fetal surgical procedures to keep mother and baby as healthy as possible.

Conditions we treat through fetal surgery or medical intervention

The fetal conditions that can be treated with surgery or medical intervention during pregnancy include:

Fluid on the lung (pleural effusion)
Severe polyhydramnios
Ascites (fluid on the abdomen)
Heart arrhythmia

Comprehensive maternal-fetal care

As part of our commitment to high-quality women's care and labor and delivery services, the Fetal Health Center at Overland Park Regional Medical Center provides hope and expert care to families with high-risk, unborn babies in the Kansas City region. Certain factors, such as age and health conditions, may cause a woman to have a high-risk pregnancy. However, mothers who have pregnancies with little to no complications may still require maternal-fetal care. This is because the mother's health doesn't always mirror her child's health in the womb.

From the moment you meet our physicians and patient navigators, you will experience our team's dedication to the best possible outcomes for you and your baby. Our patient navigators offer personalized care coordination to ensure you have a seamless patient experience. They help coordinate multidisciplinary consultations and provide individualized education and support.

Our specialized team

We offer a multidisciplinary team approach to maternal-fetal medicine. Because of this, you may have any of the following types of specialists as part of your care team:

Our maternal fetal support team

Our maternal-fetal support team provides assistance and reassurance to help relieve the anxiety and stress that can occur with a high-risk pregnancy. Our experienced doctors and registered nurses offer seamless, compassionate care, including:

Assistance with scheduling appointments
Hospital tours
Maternal-fetal care education
Ongoing communication with providers

Fetal health conditions we treat

The specialists in our maternal-fetal program treat a wide range of conditions, including:

Amniotic bands
Anorectal malformations
Bronchogenic cysts
Cleft lip and palate
Congenital diaphragmatic hernia
Congenital pulmonary airway malformation (CPAM)
Duodenal atresia
Esophageal Atresia/tracheoesophageal fistula
Fetal cardiac abnormalities
Fetal genetic disorders, such as Turner's syndrome
Gastroschisis

Hydrocephalus
Intestinal atresia
Meningomyelocele, also known as spina bifida
Neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia
Omphalocele
Pleural effusion
Pulmonary sequestration
Skeletal dysplasia
Twin-to-twin transfusion
Urinary tract obstruction

Maternal-fetal health services available at the Fetal Health Center

Our maternal-fetal and neonatal services for high-risk pregnancies and births may include:

Clinical nurse navigation and counseling
Comprehensive genetic testing and counseling
State-of-the-art diagnostic imaging services and specialized tests to diagnose conditions and manage risk factors
Fetal surgery and intervention
Multidisplinary team that includes maternal-fetal medicine physicians, OB/GYNs, neonatologists and pediatric subspecialists
Neonatal intensive care unit with a special micro-premie unit to care for our smallest babies as early as 22 weeks
Perinatal palliative care and bereavement - the region's largest and most advanced antepartum unit

Specialized prenatal care for high-risk pregnancies

Our perinatologists are experienced in diagnosing, managing and treating a wide range of multifaceted high-risk pregnancy conditions. Our specialists are experts in obstetrics and can monitor the health of both the mother and unborn baby throughout the pregnancy, intervening if any complications arise.

Health conditions, such as diabetes or lupus, may worsen through a woman's pregnancy, threatening the mother and baby. Our perinatologists use special tests and treatments to ensure the mother and child stay healthy. Our specialists also care for complications unique to pregnancy, such as preeclampsia.

Fetal surgery and intervention

Our maternal-fetal medicine specialists can treat conditions involving unborn babies using fetal surgery. Fetal surgery covers a wide range of interventions to treat unborn children's problems or complications that may arise during pregnancy. These procedures can be minimally invasive, involving needles or endoscopy, some of which we are able to do here at Overland Park Regional Medical Center. They can also be highly invasive surgical procedures involving the mother and child and require referral to specialized fetal surgery centers.

Perinatal palliative care and bereavement

We understand how difficult it can be for families to hear that their baby may die before or shortly after birth. That's why our perinatal palliative care team helps prepare families for the loss of a child. A palliative care birth plan is shared with the medical and nursing staff to support the family's wishes.

Supportive services for families during these difficult times include:

Considering memory-making options
Exploring medical decisions
Helping patients create a birth plan consistent with their wants and needs
Providing a safe environment to talk
Supporting the family's coping strategies

Neonatal intensive care

If additional care is needed after a baby's delivery, Overland Park Regional Medical Center provides state-of-the-art equipment and expert care for babies in our Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Our neonatologists are specially trained to care for newborns, especially infants with health problems that are serious or hard to diagnose or treat.

Our maternal-fetal medicine specialists communicate with our neonatologists to ensure the best possible outcomes for mothers and their children. If a baby's health condition is known before birth, a neonatologist may be needed before or during the baby's delivery and after the child is born.

Our NICU team is experienced in caring for newborns born prematurely and infants born with serious diseases, injuries and congenital disabilities, including:

Congenital diaphragmatic hernia, or CDH (a condition in which the diaphragm does not fully develop)
Gastrointestinal tract congenital disabilities (congenital disabilities of the digestive tract that may involve underdeveloped or abnormally positioned digestive organs)
Omphalocele (a congenital disability in which organs normally inside the body develop outside the body)