Search Results: MCHLine

Annotation: This online tool presents an overview of the "100 Weeks Project" by United States of Care, an initiative dedicated to addressing maternal health, particularly postpartum care, with a goal of ensuring women have comprehensive benefits for a full year after pregnancy by 2030. It maps the entire maternal journey—preconception, pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum—focusing on the disproportionate challenges faced by Black women, who are significantly more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. The resource highlights pain points within the healthcare system, such as fragmented coverage, racial bias, and a lack of support for mental health and breastfeeding, alongside "bright spots" like community organizations and culturally-concordant care. State-level data illustrates disparities in access to perinatal health workers, postpartum depression screening rates, and insurance coverage for essential services like doula and lactation consultation. Ultimately, the project uses firsthand narratives and clinical data to advocate for systemic change and improved support throughout the critical 100-week period.

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Keywords: Access to care, Barriers, Blacks, Healthcare disparities, Maternal health, Preconception care, Pregnancy, Prenatal care: Postpartum care

Annotation: This article from Grantmakers In Health (GIH) describes a collaborative effort by funders to address gaps in postpartum care following the extension of Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months after birth. The piece discusses how a workgroup of funders—including Pritzker Children's Initiative, Merck for Mothers, and Community Health Acceleration Partnership—formed in 2023 to identify opportunities for improving postpartum care systems. The article includes a visual diagram that illustrates the multi-layered challenges in postpartum care on three levels: individual, community, and system. This concentric circle diagram shows how issues such as standards of care, access to quality care, care fragmentation, and policy misalignment (at the system level) interact with community-level challenges like administrative burden and workforce shortages, as well as individual-level factors including awareness of needs, social and economic barriers, and fear of medical debt. Through stakeholder interviews, the workgroup discovered significant fragmentation of services and the absence of comprehensive care standards beyond the traditional six-week postpartum period. In response, the funders issued a request for proposals aimed at creating a centralized hub to catalog and connect postpartum care initiatives, with the goal of developing comprehensive standards and addressing what they term the "postpartum cliff."

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Keywords: Access to healthcare, Barriers, Collaboration, Funding, Health care reform, Library collection development, Medicaid, Policy, Postpartum care, Requests for proposals, Service delivery systems, Standards

Annotation: This blog post details policy and programmatic strategies states are implementing to strengthen the perinatal health care system, improve maternal health outcomes, and address disparities, particularly noting that Black women are 2.6 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women. Based on an analysis of states’ strategic plans, the key priorities for supporting pregnant and postpartum women include (1) ensuring access to timely and high-quality care, citing examples such as Iowa’s Obstetrics Mobile Simulation Training Program and North Carolina’s Region IV Provider Support Network; (2) developing and sustaining the perinatal workforce, citing examples such as Illinois DocAssist, a free statewide psychiatric access program, and New Jersey’s Maternal and Infant Health Innovation Center; and (3) supporting high-quality care coordination, citing examples such as California’s Enhanced Care Management Birth Equity Population of Focus under CalAIM and Texas’s High-Risk Maternal Care Coordination Services Program.

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Keywords: Access to care, Blacks, California, Healthcare disparities, Illinois, Iowa, Maternal health, New Jersey, North Carolina, Perinatal care, Policy, State initiatives, Strategic plans, Texas

Annotation: This policy brief defines a set of measures for evaluating grants awarded under the School-Based Telehealth Network Grant Program, administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) Office for the Advancement of Telehealth. Grants were targeted to rural, frontier, and underserved communities providing telehealth services for school children, with a particular focus on five clinical areas: asthma, behavioral health, diabetes, health weight, and oral health. The goal of the project was to identify a common set of measures that could be collected from each of the grantees for a cross-grantee assessment of school-based telehealth services, utilization, process, and outcomes.

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Keywords: Access to healthcare, Health care delivery, Health care systems, Rural health, Telecommunications, Telehealth, Telemedicine