The Incubator
The Incubator
Ben Courchia & Daphna Yasova Barbeau
#466 - [Neo News] - 📌 Why Are 4 in 10 NICU Stays Missing From Birth Records?
14 minutes Posted Sep 18, 2026 at 6:00 am.
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Send us Fan Mail Ben and Eli dig into a Journal of Perinatology study that asks a deceptively simple question: can we trust birth certificate data to tell us how many babies actually need NICU care? The answer, it turns out, is no. Nearly 40% of NICU admissions are missing from birth certificates, with the biggest gaps among full-term and late-preterm infants, and troubling racial disparities in which admissions get missed. Ben and Eli unpack what this means for how states and hospitals alloc...