American Heart Association volunteer expert, Karen Joynt Maddox, M.D., MPH, assistant professor, Washington University School of Medicine, Associate Program Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Cardiovascular Fellowship Program, Co-Director, Center for Health Economics and Policy, Institute for Public Health at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Offering perspective on AHA Scientific Sessions 2020 Presentation 209 copyright American Heart Association 2020 We know that high blood pressure during pregnancy and the complications of pregnancy are even more striking in communities of color, so Black women, Hispanic women and Native American women all have markedly higher rates of adverse birth outcomes, in large part related to things like preeclampsia and other hypertensive diseases of pregnancy. So it's really a call to action to understand why that's the case, and then to figure out what to do about it. Part of the cause is certainly systemic and organizational racism. We know that Black and Hispanic and Native American women do not have the same access to care. We know that many of them have faced discrimination and racism and stresses that actually put their bodies at higher risk for bad outcomes. We know that there's a lack of trust with the health care system, in part because of some horrific prior actions on the part of the health care system. So it really is a time for all of us to take stock to say how are we serving these communities? What is our role in trying to improve health, and that isn't just treating the individual patient, though obviously treating the individual patient is crucial. It's thinking more broadly about some of these systemic issues and the ways that those have contributed to poor health by race and ethnicity, and thinking through how we can start to dismantle those things to really improve long term health for women of color."