(NewsNation) — Helping soon-to-be moms cover their rent has led to significant improvements in the child’s overall health, Ohio researchers have found.

An Ohio-based program called Healthy Beginnings at Home found that the key to healthier babies is stable, affordable housing, easing the stress off mothers to focus on the new responsibilities of caring for their children.

It’s a solution to a problem much bigger than Ohio. In 2020, there were about five deaths for every thousand births in the U.S., the highest rate among wealthy countries. That mortality rate is significantly higher for women of color, driven largely by social and economic factors, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The goal of the program was to ease the financial burden, allowing mothers to reduce stress and create a stable home environment for the child to be born into.

During the study, researchers recruited 100 low-income pregnant women in the Columbus, Ohio area, with half receiving support and the other half left alone to be studied as a comparison group.

Mothers who got the support were given a subsidy to ensure they wouldn’t have to spend more than 30% of their income on rent for the first 15 months of the program, long enough to ensure it was provided after the child was born.

Additionally, they received a smaller subsidy for the following six months and were connected with a housing support specialist.

“(They) worked with the women throughout the entire program helping them address any needs that they had in finding house, staying in housing, working out issues in their housing,” said Amy Riegel, one of the people who helped administer the program and today serves as the executive director of Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

Those who received help were 60% less likely to need neonatal intensive care for their babies. For those babies that did go to the NICU, the length of stay was 75% shorter.

The women who had received the housing support were also much more likely to have full-term and healthy-weight babies than those who didn’t. Among the women who participated and didn’t receive support, there were four fetal deaths.

Riegel says Healthy Beginnings at Home is currently recruiting for a larger study, hopefully broadening to additional Ohio cities like Akron, Cleveland, Dayton and Cincinnati.

For ethical reasons, this time there won’t be a control group and all participants will receive support.

The ongoing challenge for Riegel and others who are working on the next round of Healthy Beginnings at Home is securing enough funding because existing research is limited.

Also, a shortage of affordable housing can also make implementing the program difficult.

“Housing is just a crisis in so many communities across the country. There’s not enough units available. There are not enough large units — especially for families with more than two children — available. And how fast the rent is rising is somewhat unsustainable based on the wages that many of the women earn,” she said.

Riegel hopes that the next study will continue to shine a light on the link between housing stability and healthy births. Proving such a link may have ramifications for how government programs like Medicaid support low-income mothers.

“Just as Medicaid is able to pay for a prenatal vitamin or a well-check or an ultrasound in the doctor’s office, if we know that housing would help improve that birth outcome then Medicaid funds would be able to also pay for rent and utility assistance during the pregnancy and immediately after,” she said.