Business Women Awards 2022
Achievement Honoree Kathleen Moren, Healthy Babies, Happy Moms Inc.
MANY YEARS AGO, registered nurse Kathleen Moren noticed that breastfeeding mothers in Rhode Island were lacking the support they needed.
Her time working as a nurse in Chicago was markedly different than what she saw available to the health care industry and its patients when she moved to Rhode Island. There was programming in Chicago to ensure mothers received the lactation support in the hospital and beyond, she said.
In Rhode Island, Moren believed that help fell short. So, she started Healthy Babies, Happy Moms Inc. in East Greenwich in 1999.
The licensed and accredited health-nursing agency provides mothers with in-home lactation consultations, sleep consultations, breast pump rentals and more. When Moren first started her company, she would need to coordinate blood-draw appointments for patients’ newborns at the hospital where they were born. Hospitals wanted to check babies’ bilirubin levels.
Bilirubin is formed when red blood cells break down and are excreted by the body. But infants can take some time after birth to properly metabolize bilirubin and can develop a condition called jaundice, which needs close monitoring. Some newborns need a treatment where the bilirubin is converted to a different form so the liver and kidneys can more easily process and excrete it. This kind of treatment – phototherapy – involves exposure to a special kind of blue-green light.
The problem, Moren said, is that doing the blood draw at the hospital could result in a baby being readmitted or the discharge being delayed if bilirubin levels were high. Breastfeeding mothers would need to stay at the hospital – and would often have to make babysitting arrangements for other siblings at home – or go home and be separated from their newborns.
But now, partnering with certain health insurers, Healthy Babies, Happy Moms offers bilirubin blood draws, assessments and home visits from registered nurses who can use at-home phototherapy equipment.
“I have to say that I am equally proud of being able to help those women,” Moren said. “They shouldn’t be made to feel that they are doing something wrong, or that they are a failure. There is a nonjudgmental space in my company to help them navigate whatever they want to do. Some want to pump, some nurse twice a day … we help all of them.”