STUDY PROTOCOL Open Access Efficacy of a midwife-coordinated, individualized, and specialized maternity care intervention (ChroPreg) in addition to standard care in pregnant women with chronic disease: protocol for a parallel randomized controlled trial Mie Gaarskjaer de Wolff 1,2,3* , Marianne Johansen 1,4 , Anne S. Ersbøll 1,5 , Susanne Rosthøj 6 , Anne Brunsgaard 2 , Julie Midtgaard 7,8 , Ann Tabor 9,10 and Hanne Kristine Hegaard 1,2,11 Abstract Background and objectives: The number of women of childbearing age with chronic diseases is rising. Evidence has shown that obstetric complications and poor psychological well-being are more prevalent among this group, in addition to these women reporting experiences of less than satisfactory care. More research is needed to investigate how to best meet the special needs of this group during pregnancy and postpartum. Previous research has shown that care coordination, continuity of care, woman-centered care, and specialized maternity care interventions delivered to women with high-risk pregnancies can improve patient-reported outcomes and pregnancy outcomes and be cost- effective. However, no previous trials have examined the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of such interventions among pregnant women with chronic diseases. This paper describes the protocol of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a midwife-coordinated, individualized and specialized maternity care intervention (ChroPreg) as an add-on to standard care for pregnant women with chronic diseases. (Continued on next page) © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. * Correspondence: mie.gaarskjaer.de.wolff.01@regionh.dk 1 Department of Obstetrics, Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, Blegdamsvej 9, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark 2 Research Unit for Women’s and Children’s Health, The Juliane Marie Centre, Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, Blegdamsvej 9, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark Full list of author information is available at the end of the article de Wolff et al. Trials (2019) 20:291 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-019-3405-5