Cohort profile: The Mount Sinai Perinatal Ambulatory Care Cohort, a longitudinal electronic health record cohort of perinatal care utilization.

The Mount Sinai Perinatal Ambulatory Care Cohort was established to address limitations of existing postpartum surveillance datasets, particularly the underrepresentation of urban, minority, and publicly insured populations and the absence of systematic postpartum mental health screening data. It was designed to examine postpartum healthcare utilization, obstetric outcomes, and perinatal mental health in a large hospital-based ambulatory collaborative care practice in New York City. The cohort includes all individuals receiving prenatal and postpartum care through the Mount Sinai Hospital Obstetrics and Gynecology Ambulatory Practice between January 1, 2011, and December 31, 2023. Exclusion of records with incomplete obstetric data yielded an analytic cohort of 15,864 pregnancy episodes. Participants are predominantly individuals of low socioeconomic status from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups; approximately 88% are enrolled in government-subsidized insurance programs. Data are collected prospectively through the Mount Sinai Health System electronic health record and cover demographic characteristics, insurance status, prenatal care utilization, obstetric outcomes, postpartum visit attendance, and standardized postpartum depression screening with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. A clinical decision support "hard stop" embedded in the electronic health record ensures near-complete capture of perinatal mental health screening among individuals attending postpartum care.