Women deserve better access to care. I learned that firsthand.

At Medallion, we talk a lot about reducing administrative friction in healthcare. But what does that actually mean for patients? This Women's Health Month, our VP of Marketing Lauren Mitri Abalos put it in her own words — drawing on her own experience navigating maternity care in rural America. Originally published on her LinkedIn, we're sharing it here because the conversation is too important to keep in one place.

I just came back from maternity leave. And honestly, I'm still processing — not just the newborn haze, but everything that came before it.

I live in a rural, but up-and-coming area. When I got pregnant, I assumed finding an OB would be straightforward.

It wasn't.

I didn’t have many in-network practices to choose from. And the few that I did were so booked out that I established care with the first OB that was available. But after that first appointment, I ended up seeing whoever was available.

Not by choice, but because that was the only option. And I knew going in that the odds of my OB actually delivering my baby were slim. You don't get your doctor. You get whoever's on.

And that's if you're lucky enough to have options at all. Where I live, the labor and delivery units have no more than six beds, the NICU is a Level 2, and if all goes well, you go home after 24 hours.

But, if something had gone wrong, my baby or I would have been transferred over an hour away. That thought sat with me through most of my pregnancy.

I, like many women, didn’t have the smoothest birthing experience. I didn’t get to immediately savor the newborn bliss — I was reliant on the doctors and nurses in the room to make sure I would physically be okay.

And I experienced this not just with my first baby, but my second as well.

I share this not for sympathy, but because I think a lot of women reading this will recognize some version of it. And because the data confirms what so many of us feel firsthand.

More than 2.3 million women of reproductive age live in counties without a single birthing facility or OB clinician — what the March of Dimes calls a “maternity care desert”.

Another 3 million live in counties with limited access. Half of all U.S. counties have no OB-GYN at all.

And according to a 2025 analysis by the Society for Women's Health Research, women rate their overall access to care at a C+ — while men have pulled ahead into B- territory.

The gap isn't just persisting. It's widening.

These aren't abstract numbers. They're the backdrop to real pregnancies, real decisions, real moments of uncertainty.

I think about this a lot in the context of the work we do at Medallion. On the surface, what we do — healthcare credentialing, payer enrollment, provider onboarding — doesn't sound like it's about women's health. But coming back from leave, I see the connection more clearly than ever.

The time it takes to get a provider credentialed and into a network is time a patient is waiting – but more than that, it’s a cost that mothers may never know is coming.

But, more importantly, when you’re in labor, none of that matters — the ripple effects go further than access. What ultimately happens is an unexpected bill in the patient's mailbox — I learned that firsthand, too.

During my pregnancy, I confirmed multiple times that my doctor, the facility, and the NICU were all in-network. What I didn't know — couldn't have known — was that because of an anesthesiologist shortage, the hospital anesthesiologist who administered my epidural was there on admitting privileges and wasn't in-network with my insurance. The epidural wasn't covered.

When I called my insurance company, the response was:

"I'm so sorry. This is really common — you need to ask about that next time."

My choices were to skip the epidural or pay the unexpected expense, which came to close to $6,000. As it turns out, I'm far from alone — this happens to roughly 1 in 10 women who give birth in the US.

This is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Access isn't just about whether you can get an appointment. It's about whether, when you do get care, the systems behind it are working well enough to protect you from the unexpected.

For women in rural or underserved areas, where there may only be one OB-GYN within an hour's drive, that delay isn't just inconvenient. It can mean going without care entirely, or making do with whatever's available — which is exactly what I found myself doing.

We're projected to be short of nearly 9,900 OB-GYNs by 2037 — and women in underserved areas will feel that shortage first. Solving it will require policy changes, training investment, and a rethinking of how care is delivered. But it also requires removing every unnecessary barrier that slows providers down before they ever see their first patient.

That's the part we can help with.

Credentialing alone won't close a shortage of providers. But consider this: the average credentialing process takes 90 to 120 days. That's the time a fully trained provider is ready to see patients but can't — not because of a skills gap, but because of paperwork.

Across thousands of providers, that administrative lag creates an artificial capacity deficit that we actually can do something about. A faster process won't create more OB-GYNs, but it can meaningfully reduce the time between a provider being trained and them actually seeing patients.

Faster credentialing means providers get into networks sooner. It means healthcare organizations can expand capacity — particularly in specialties like women's health where the need is most acute. It means the administrative burden that burns out clinicians gets lighter, not heavier.

And it means patients are less likely to find themselves holding a surprise bill for care they thought was covered.

Access to care isn't just about whether providers exist. It's about whether the systems around them work well enough to actually connect them to the patients who need them – and support the patients with cost-effective care.

This Women's Health Month, that connection feels personal to me in a way it didn't before. And it's a reminder that reducing administrative friction in healthcare isn't just an operational problem — it's a care access problem. A real one, for real people.

To every provider working in women's health: thank you. We're building the infrastructure to make your path to patients a little easier.