Intermountain Health Among Experts Attending White House Conference on Women’s Health Research

An Intermountain Health physician who has played a key role in advancing women’s health was among a select group of women’s health advocates and experts invited to the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which is working to improve women’s health across the nation.

Last week, President Joe Biden and First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, invited a select group of women’s health advocates, clinicians, researchers, experts, investors and philanthropists to the White House for a conference to celebrate the program’s success.

Intermountain Health’s senior medical director of women’s health for Utah and Idaho, Audrey Jiricko, MD, was among them.

Dr. Jiricko has played a key role in advancing women’s health at Intermountain Health. As an obstetrician-gynecologist, she has helped activate intimate partner violence screening and pioneer the integration of mental health screening in the OB-GYN setting.

Aside from improving patients’ health and safety, these practices recognize the holistic scope of women’s health issues and challenges.

“We’re not only able to connect patients to resources, but also to find links between a history of traumatic stress and other health conditions like chronic pelvic pain,” said Dr. Jiricko. “It helps us look at each patient as a whole person.”

That’s an ethos Dr. Jiricko has brought to her whole career.

She’s collaborated across disciplines to promote best practices in women’s health, recently leading the creation of Intermountain Health’s first Women’s Heart Health Program.

Heart disease is the number one killer of women nationally, but women’s heart research lags behind research specific to men – as does women’s heart care. Statistically, across the nation, women who complain about chest pain wait longer to receive an EKG than men, and women who suffer heart attacks wait longer than men for intervention.

Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy – which include chronic or gestational high blood pressure, and the more serious preeclampsia and eclampsia – can affect the health of the mother and baby during pregnancy, and can also impact their long-term cardiovascular health.

Dr. Jiricko is working with an Intermountain cardiovascular research team to review health records from more than 200,000 Intermountain patients who’ve had hypertensive disorders during pregnancy.

The goal is to map what Intermountain can do as a health system to implement proactive care and prevent negative outcomes, including outpatient and in-home blood pressure monitoring during pregnancy and long-term follow-up afterward.

“We have so much data,” said Dr. Jiricko. “We support more than 40,000 deliveries per year. It’s an exciting opportunity.”

It’s all work that embodied the spirit of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health, which President Biden said at the event is intended to “fundamentally change and improve how we invest in women’s health.” For Dr. Jiricko, it was a reminder that the work she’s led and continues to lead at Intermountain really does make a difference.

The Initiative is leading the way by allocating nearly $1 billion in funding from a variety of federal agencies to improve women’s health across the country.

“Every time I attend a national event like this, I appreciate Intermountain Health even more,” she said. “We’re doing great research, but we’re also operationalizing those best practices to deliver excellent care to our patients. Our focus on becoming a model health system brings it all together.”

About Intermountain Health

Headquartered in Utah with locations in six states and additional operations across the western U.S., Intermountain Health is a not-for-profit system of 34 hospitals, approximately 400 clinics, medical groups with some 4,600 employed physicians and advanced care providers, a health plans division called Select Health with more than one million members, and other health services. Helping people live the healthiest lives possible, Intermountain is committed to improving community health and is widely recognized as a leader in transforming healthcare by using evidence-based best practices to consistently deliver high-quality outcomes at sustainable costs. For up-to-date information and announcements, please see the Intermountain Health newsroom at https://intermountainhealthcare.org/news.