ASHEVILLE, N.C. — When Hannah White first showed up at the Mountain Area Health Education Center here three years ago, she was in trouble.

She was 20 years old, a couple months into her first pregnancy and on the run from an abusive husband in Texas who already had broken her ribs in an attempt, she said, to kill her unborn child. She also has a form of hemophilia which prevents her body from producing platelet granules that stem bleeding. That disease had robbed her of her Malawian mother when Hannah was three months old, which ultimately led to her adoption by American missionaries.

“I was a mess,” White recalled when she first showed up at MAHEC, which serves a 16-county area of western North Carolina. “I was worried about the abuse and was having this bleeding and afraid I was going to die or lose my baby.

MAHEC’s ob-gyn program is part of a statewide initiative in North Carolina that identifies low-income women whose pregnancies present a high risk to either the baby or mother. All the women receive care through “medical homes,” in which teams of providers work together to provide coordinated care.