State Maternal Health Innovation awardees share strategies to systematically improve maternal health and equity in outcomes.
The present focus on addressing maternal morbidity and mortality is long overdue. Rates of maternal death in the United States have been documented since the 1900s, yet the number and rate of deaths continue to escalate alongside widening disparities. With renewed attention to the issue, all facets of public, private, and nonprofit organizations have joined together to systematically improve maternal health and equity in outcomes. State and local health departments are critical stakeholders in this multisector network of maternal health champion, and several share their insights in the article, “What It Really Takes to Succeed: Practical Tips for Maternal Health Collaboration.”
Read the Article
These agencies are staffed by public health practitioners with deep knowledge of the maternal health challenges affecting their communities and can serve as a lifeline to women and their families through wraparound services, education, and other forms of support. Health departments are even more effective when partnering with like-minded institutions pursuing better and more equitable maternal health outcomes.
Such is the ideology of the State Maternal Health Innovation Program MHI Program, which seeks to improve state capacity through coordination and collaboration using public health approaches, direct service delivery, and maternal health data to support the implementation of innovative maternal health strategies and reduce inequities. The Health Resources and Services Administration in 2019 launched the State MHI Program, with nine award recipients that entered into five-year cooperative agreements. Funded states include Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
The funded states were tasked with strengthening partnerships and collaboration by establishing a state-focused maternal health task force, improving state-level data surveillance on maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity, and promoting and executing innovation in maternal health service delivery. These awardees address a variety of US maternal health challenges, each taking a unique approach to improving maternal health outcomes in their state. Across the program, awardees test various innovative approaches, collaborate with key stakeholders, and address and advance maternal health equity.
“What It Really Takes to Succeed: Practical Tips for Maternal Health Collaboration” highlights several examples from the State MHI Program and its awardees that health departments may consider integrating within their maternal health collaborations. One such example is to leverage existing tools, resources, and initiatives. The State MHI Program and its awardees have demonstrated how to leverage existing efforts and resources, such as staff from community partners, federal funds from grants, and findings from environmental scans, as the basis for their work. Acknowledging existing statewide efforts influencing maternal health is one such strategy.
State MHI Programs do this in part through the creation of a state-focused maternal health task force. Each MHTF is charged with creating and implementing a maternal health strategic plan that incorporates activities outlined in the state’s most recent Title V needs assessment, improves state-level data surveillance on maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity, and implements innovative strategies targeted at the state’s leading causes of adverse maternal health outcomes.
An additional example is to convene partners from an array of backgrounds. Convening multidisciplinary teams helps to ensure that challenges in maternal health are approached from multiple viewpoints, incorporating a range of useful expertise and experience. Traditional partners, such as perinatal quality collaboratives, community action networks, and maternal mortality review committees, bring expertise, lessons learned, and key connections. Meanwhile, nontraditional partners, such as women’s shelters, public safety organizations, refugee and immigration service providers, state hospital associations, payers, assistance agencies, and charitable donor organizations, bring innovation, diverse perspectives, and lived experience to improving maternal health.
A successful maternal health collaboration is built on shared trust among partners. Working together, these entities can and will systematically improve maternal health and equity in outcomes. Check out their efforts in the article, “What It Really Takes to Succeed: Practical Tips for Maternal Health Collaboration.”
Piia H. Brown, MSPH, MBA, has over 20 years’ experience working with academic institutions, non-profits, corporations, and local, state, and federal public health programs. Her past roles include Medicaid Chief of Quality for the Louisiana Department of Health, Chief of Perinatal and Infant Health at the Washington DC Department of Health, Senior Program Manager at the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, Program Analyst for the Metro Nashville/Davidson County Public Health Department, and adjunct faculty for George Mason University and Lamar University. She is currently the principal consultant for Ph Solutions, a boutique public health consulting firm, and adjunct faculty for the Leadership Development to Advance Equity in Health Care program conducted with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a co-author in the 4th edition of Kotch’s Maternal and Child Health: Problems, Programs, and Policy in Public Health, and also in the Practical Playbook III: Working Together to Improve Maternal Health.