Spotlight On: Maternal Health
From addressing the root causes of adverse pregnancy outcomes to transforming payment models to pay for and deliver comprehensive healthcare, Abt helps clients and partners close the gap in maternal health disparities. Our approach to maternal, child, and reproductive health engages patients, families, providers, community partners, and government agencies to ensure our work can offer practical solutions that truly meet patient needs.
Our teams provide services at the regional, state, and local levels. We use innovative and evidence-based interventions, provide rigorous evaluation, and advance effective practices that will scale to ensure the delivery of cost-effective, high-quality services for pregnant people and their babies.
Our staff include nationally renowned experts in the fields of reproductive, maternal and child health, quality measurement and improvement, evaluation design, qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis, Medicaid programs, alternative payment models, and technical assistance. We have first-hand experience carrying out a variety of reproductive, maternal, and child health projects, including implementing learning collaboratives, developing and maintaining quality improvement projects, designing, and delivering rigorous evaluations, building relationships with key groups and partners, and leading critical multi-site studies. Highlights include:
- Providing national evaluation and technical support on CMS, CDC, and HRSA maternal health projects focused on integrated care, addressing disparities, and ending maternal mortality.
- Unparalleled experience in alternative payment models—including accountable care organizations bundled payments, and patient-centered medical homes— to ensure the highest value quality care.
- Decades of expertise in complex research studies, including quantitative and qualitative methods like Photovoice and journey mapping interviews, to ensure that beneficiaries’ perspectives are central to the work and inform solutions.
- Extensive support to expand and strengthen the healthcare workforce and infrastructure—including through recruitment and retention of community health workers, midwives, behavioral health providers, and doulas—as well as development of innovative models of care delivery to provide services in under resourced areas.
- Smart and invested health services researchers who understand how Medicaid programs at the federal and state levels can deliver quality of care while maximizing resources for people today and tomorrow.
Maternal Opioid Misuse Model Evaluation
Client: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
CMS’s Maternal Opioid Misuse (MOM) model funded State Medicaid Agencies to improve care coordination and links to social services for pregnant and postpartum people enrolled in Medicaid with opioid use disorder. In collaboration with partners, Abt is evaluating the model’s ability to improve access to treatment, quality of care, and the care experience, as well its ability to create sustainable coverage and payment mechanisms.
Evaluating CMS’s InCK Model for Kids with Complex Health Needs
Client: CMS
The Integrated Care for Kids (InCK) payment and delivery model was designed to better integrate service delivery across behavioral, physical, and other health-related services for children, with the goal of reducing Medicaid expenditures and improving outcomes. Abt is leading a mixed methods evaluation design to assess its impacts on children across participating communities. The results will address whether early identification, service integration, and alternative payment models improve the well-being of children and their families.
EMPower: Enhancing Maternity Practices
Client: CDC
In partnership with the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute (CGBI) and Population Health Improvement Partners (PHIP), Abt supported the CDC through EMPower, a collaborative learning and quality improvement project aimed at improving breastfeeding rates throughout the U.S. Through this contract, Abt reached more than 125 participating hospitals. Convening complementary skillsets is an Abt specialty, and we brought together breastfeeding and quality improvement experts to provide technical assistance to a group of recruited hospitals. Our team then coordinated several training activities for the hospitals, including an environmental scan of existing resources and a unique technical assistance plan specific to each hospital. Abt monitored and evaluated the effectiveness of the technical assistance and training strategies and provided reports on the progress made.
Evaluation and Technical Support to Federal Reproductive, Maternal and Infant Health Projects
Client: HRSA
For decades Abt has provided support to improve the health of women, infants, children and families. This work included Healthy Start, where we led a rigorous data linking study to examine state vital records, data from CDC’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System and data from individual Healthy Start programs to promote the health of women, children and families across the U.S. Through IM CoIIN, we partnered with sites in the South and Midwest, using human-centered design skills to support efforts to end infant mortality. Our technical assistance included near real-time data for program decision-making, program innovation, and tailored information technology solutions. The Abt team currently supports HRSA’s Quality Improvement Fund – Maternal Health, in partnership with HealthBegins and the Preeclampsia Foundation’s MoMMA’s Voices initiative.
