-Michael R Berman, MD
The "ethos" or reason for Maternl©
"One standard of care for all"
"I am first a physician, a distant disciple of Aesculapius and Hippocrates1; a clinician, a teacher, and a student. I am an Obstetrician. I stand before my patients2 and facilitate their births. I share their joys; I feel their pains. Yet, caring for the well-being and the illnesses of patients and their families is to accept that medical science in all its depth and possibilities is not precise and that the human mind and flesh are perishable. We are today steeped in myriad medical technologies that in themselves bring hope to previously hopeless conditions and pathologies. Yet there remains inexorable suffering which accompanies failures and tribulations not only of these new medical technologies but of pervasive disparities which exist to deny access to one standard of care for all, disparities defined by the social determinants of health:3 the paradox of our societies to both cure and cause pain which is real and evident.
I believe that we as practitioners and guardians of humanity's health, have been granted by oath and by ethic the privilege to examine and treat, to counsel and advise our fellow human beings and we must never abandon the souls of all patients seeking our care. It is my hope that Maternl© will propagate and preserve these tenets."
Prociedo4
Going forward (l)
Today are times of much despair
Yet times of great hope
To affirm our oath
As unfiltered reason and purpose
Rush in our blood
Every pulse a wave
Approaching distant shores
To leave our prejudice behind
To fade into vapors
As common as fog
And guide us to plant
Roots to bond our humanhood and
Vines to grow our brotherhood
As we go forth into tomorrow.
Michael R Berman, MD, MBI, FACOG
Founder, Maternl©
Brief Bio
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1In Greek mythology, "Aesculapius, son of Apollo, the god of healing, was a famous physician. Hippocrates, was a member of the Asclepiadae- priest physicians whose origins may be traced to the mythical personage, Aesculapius"
2Obstare from the Latin meaning "To Stand before"; the root word of Obstetrics
3 "The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities - the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries." https://www.who.int/social_determinants/sdh_definition/en/
4 A poem defined by our times, September, 2020.
A personal prenatal health record
The Maternl© Personal Prenatal Health Record (PPHR) is a portable, secure and interactive electronic personal health record, designed specifically for pregnant women in underserved, urban and rural communities, nationally and internationally.
This program provides a place to document, store and retrieve:
- Current pregnancy information
- Past pregnancy information
- Prenatal visit Information
- Medical, family and social history
- Thoughts, questions and information to share with your healthcare providersbat each visit to better understand their care and help you take part in decision-making for your pregnancy
- Your baby's movements (kick counts)
- A daily diary to track how you are feeling and alert you if you need to contact your healthcare providet
A program to help alleviate the pain and sorrow of a pregnancy or newborn loss
"Though strangers we may be, we are all connectied by the loss of a child, and that makes us all soulmates..."
Maternl© strives to improve the awareness of the impact of perinatal, neonatal and infant loss on families, community and society and supports the premise that perinatal and infant morbidity and mortality can be affected by providing all women and their families who have experienced perinatal losses the availability of perinatal bereavement counseling, pre- and inter-conception counseling( including an evaluation and understanding of their losses) and access to comprehensive women's healthcare services.
Here you will:
- Learn about the importance of bereavement care after a pregnancy of newborn loss
- Find comfort in sharing writings, poetry and stories of loss and hope
- Be able to join an international community of families who have experienced pregnancy and /or newborn losses both recently and from up to 25 years ago
- Have access to Berevaement resources and support groups
- Be able to communicate directly with the Maternl© bereavement team if you are in need of further resources and referrals near your home
A complementary service to rededicate an original, personal poem to a loved one or friend
Poetry enables me to ask why even when we already understand how. It permits me as a Doctor of Medicine, witness to the frailties of our humanity, to abet healing through the very core of what makes us human, our language and our personal emotions. It is my platform to tell my 'stories', to honor my patients, my friends, my family and indeed, the essence of humanity, the "family of man". It is my hope that offering these very personal poems to the users of Maternl© for their own or to be shared with friends and family will bring solace, comfort and hope at most difficult of times and celebrate and honor those of friends, family and colleagues who are in deed praise-worthy of such.
Here you may:
- Request an original poem, rededicated and personalized to memorialize a pregnancy or newborn loss, specific for a particular typle of loss; i.e. stillbirth, miscarriage, newborn
- Request an original poem, rededicated and personalized to honor, eulogize or celebrate the lives and deaths of others
- Receive immediately the poem, signed by Dr. Berman, with the name of the baby, child or adult to whom it is dedicated and suitable and ready for framing
A tool to help find a healthcare center for pre-natal and
women's health care including a personalized letter of introduction
"Get The Healthcare You Deserve"
The Maternl© organization believes that all families must be able to enter and be embraced by a healthcare system. Through its 'GetCare' program, Maternl© can provide not only help with finding and access to pre-natal care centers and resources, but Maternl© fosters advocacy and personalized direction to these center by providing a letter of introduction to the center so dignity and respect can be realized and essential pre-natal care services be obtained.
A forum to share professional and personal reflections on humanistic maternal and child healthcare
Here, you - including but not limited to healthcare professionals, students and patients - will find a place to document and share personal reflections, essays, stories and commentaries that reflect perspectives on maternal and child healthcare, including humanism, disparities in access and care, ethics and the importance of trust: the hallmark of the doctor-patient relationship as well as thoughts and teachings about our patients when they die or are incurable: the ultimate challenge to the bond of patient with doctor.
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Mission
The mission of Maternl© is to improve pregnancy health-related experiences and outcomes, in a milieu of empathy, compassion, advocacy and trust by addressing gaps, disparities and unmet needs in care including the:
need for universal adoption of one standard of maternal care for all need for immediate and continuous access to personal prenatal health record information
disparities and barriers to access to maternal (pre-natal) healthcare services
disparities in the quality of provider-patient relationships through a compelling need for omnipresent, patient-centered, humanistic care access to resources for pregnancy loss, stillbirth, or neonatal death: imperative and essential bereavement care for healing and well-being for all parents who have experienced such losses
Maternl©, a division of Hygeia Health Systems LLC, provides unique software programs developed specifically to offer opportunities and advantages to improve gaps and disparities in prenatal health care for women and their families, world-wide. Maternl© addresses access to maternal and child healthcare and is particularly focused on disparities to early entry into prenatal healthcare services, in an effort to reduce associated prematurity, neonatal and infant mortality. Maternl©provides important tools to monitor each pregnancy's progress, better understand the providers' care, and offers assistance to access maternal and child healthcare services and resources. Maternl© comforts and supports all pregnancy and newborn related concerns, particularly should one have a miscarriage or very complicated pregnancy that might end with a pregnancy loss, stillbirth or neonatal death. More
About Founder, President and CEO 1 Hygeia Health Systems, LLC, symbolic of the Greek mythological goddess of health and healing for which it is named, represents a concern for the human dimension of healthcare and medicine, the use of new technologies to share age-old lessons, the development of software programs to improve quality, safety, empathy, compassion and physician-patient engagement and a concern to address disparities in access to and outcomes of care, domestically and internationally.
Personal Prenatal Health Information Record
Maternl© offers a portable, interactive electronic Personal Prenatal Health Information Record( PPHIR ). The Maternl© PPHIR is designed to be used for all pregnant women and particulary for those in underserved, urban communities. Many women in urban, underserved communities do not have readily accessible and continuous access to pre-natal care, may get fragmented care at multiple facilities ("unregistered" patients) and may present to a provider in one or more of those facilities who is unfamiliar with her health history, family history and her prior physical examinations and findings, knowledge of which would contribute to a higher quality and safer prenatal visit / encounter. As a portable, mobile and interactive personal health record, the Maternl PPHIR©, developed and designed specifically for pregnant women by an obstetrician, Dr. Michael R Berman, replaces the commonly used handwritten "paper card" format to record pre-natal care information. Such a card carried by the patient, sometimes referred to as a "Pregnancy Passport," is sub-optimal in today's contemporary healthcare and health information technology environment. The information that is entered is stored on the Maternl Secure server, and also sent to the user's email server for immediate reference from their computer or cell phone.1
More about the Maternl© PPHIR
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1Cell Phone Penetration
Pregnancy and Newborn Loss
Maternl© strives to improve the awareness of the impact of perinatal, neonatal and infant loss on families, community and society and supports the premise that perinatal and infant morbidity and mortality can be affected by providing all women and their families who have experienced perinatal losses the availability of perinatal bereavement counseling, pre- and inter-conception counseling( including an evaluation and understanding of their losses) and access to comprehensive women's healthcare services.
Maternl© provides tools and resources to support and comfort families who have experienced a pregnancy loss or newborn death, personalized original poetry to memorialize, honor and provide hope and a community of families, recent and past, who have experienced losses with whom you can share stories. More
"Though strangers we may be, we are all connectied by the loss of a child, and that makes us all soulmates..."
Request a Personalized Poem
The impact of words and thoughts at difficult times of loss are universal. Upon other occasions, poetry can equally bridge the chasm of what to say and what is felt at significant times in our lives. Through metaphor and allusion, rhyming and meter; for eulogy and celebration; for love, understanding and hope, poetry does "matter". Poetry, a central foundation to the Maternl© organization, enables me to ask why even when we already understand how. It permits me as a Doctor of Medicine, witness to the frailties of our humanity, to abet healing through the very core of what makes us human, ur language and our personal emotions. It has been my platform to tell my 'stories', to honor my patients, my friends, my family and indeed, the essence of humanity, the "family of man". It is my hope that offering these very personal poems to the visitors at Maternl© for their own purpose or to be shared with friends and familywill bring solace, comfort, joy, meaning and hope at difficult as well as joyous times.
As an Obstetrician, my professional mission has involved a striving to bring comfort and healing to children, born and yet to born, and to mothers through their years of childbearing and beyond. I have been uplifted by the triumphs of birth and healing and depressed by the failures. Yet I have always tried to look beyond the failures in search of the triumphs. I have counseled patients at the darkest times of their lives, when their children have died, and I have turned to the comfort of personal reflection, poetry and self-expression to better help me help my patients. Maternl©, along with the companion book, Parenthood Lost, I am sharing these personal poems, essays and thoughts; my personal approach to my patients that I can now extend to many others to help comfort those who have endured the tragedy of a Pregnancy Loss and / or Neonatal Death. Unique to Maternl© website is the opportunity to re-dedicate an original poem to honor their child (or for someone else's child ) and download this personalized, signed poem.
For those who would like to contribute to and help sustain the mission of Maternl©, you may select a poem written and rededicated for the loss of a pregnancy or newborn or a poem for other occasions to honor, eulogize or celebrate; occassions that might be appropriate for you or for your friends, family or colleagues.
An Obstetrician's Poetry, Personal Thoughts and Words
Sample a few select poems
Get The Health Care You Deserve©...
The Maternl© organization believes that all families must be able to enter and be embraced by a healthcare system. Through its 'GetCare' program, Maternl© can provide not only help with finding and access to pre-natal care centers and resources, but Maternl© fosters advocacy and personalized direction to these center by providing a letter of introduction to the center so dignity and respect can be realized and essential pre-natal care services be obtained.
At this time, this program is only available in the United States but will be expanded internationally in the near future.
More About GetCare© Print this GetCare© Letter of introduction and bring it with you
Thoughts, Reflections and Humanism in Medicine
Here, you will find a space to document personal reflections, essays, stories and commentaries that reflect perspectives on maternal and child healthcare, humanism, caring and medicine and the importance of trust: the hallmark of the doctor-patient relationship as well as thoughts and teachings about our patients when they die or are incurable: the ultimate challenge to the bond of patient with doctor.
It is also a space to share any thoughts the user would like to document regarding their pregnancy, their prenatal care, questions about where to find resources, etc. and for the user to keep a private, anonymous personal diary, visible only to the user. This platform is accessed only by the registered user's email address and Maternl© username's credentials. The Maternl© leadership and professional advisory team comprised of multicultural, international, experienced professionals from the disciplines of health sciences, specifically obstetrics, 'mother-baby' nursing, patient safety, mid-wifery, ethics, medical education (faculty, medical students, House Staff) and health informatics may also participate in contributions to this space. ( Please note that inappropriate comments will be removed at the discretion of the Maternl© team.)
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Contact Information
Michael R. Beman, MD, MBI, FACOG
Founder, President and CEO
Maternl©
Hygeia Health Systems, LLC
P.O Box 3674
Woodbridge, Connecticut 06525
http://hygeia.org http://maternl.org
info@hygeia.org