At Childbirth Connection, one of our mantras is: A high-quality, high-value maternity care system is within reach, but none of us can do it alone. The Transforming Maternity Care '2020 Vision' and 'Blueprint for Action' reports, released last year, involved intense collaborative work by all stakeholders - from delivery system leaders, providers, and consumers to health plan and purchaser leaders, liability insurers and quality experts. But these consensus documents are just the beginning. The devil is in the details, and much more work is needed to implement the Blueprint's recommendations and continually refine quality improvement efforts.

To foster and accelerate implementation, Childbirth Connection just launched a new Transforming Maternity Care web site. Whereas ChildbirthConnection.org offers evidence-based information to women and health professionals to aid decision making, the Transforming Maternity Caresite addresses system reform. We thought about four major factors that could get in the way of our collective ability to seize unprecedented opportunities to effect real change, and set out to offer solutions.

Problem:The 2020 Vision and Blueprint for Action are robust but dense and may be hard to digest at once.

Solution: This problem was easy to address. The Vision and Blueprint now each have home pages of their own, and the content is delivered in smaller chunks in both HTML and PDF. Want to know about how performance measurement fits into maternity care system improvement? Go straight to the performance measurement page. From there you have the key messages available at a glance or you can drill deeper to understand the problems in the current system and read the in-depth recommendations and action steps. You can also download the full-text of that Blueprint section(pdf). Also at your fingertips: watch a webinar, access a bibliography of studies, reports and other background materials, and search for projects in our Transforming Maternity Care Directory that address performance measurement.

Performance measurement isn't your cup of tea? Just pick any of the10 other focal areas (like care coordination, informed decision making, or liability reform) and drill down the same way.

Problem:Many individuals and organizations want to help fix maternity care, but stakeholders may not know where to begin.

Solution: Behold: the Action Center. No matter what kind of stakeholder you are, there's something you can begin doing today to help improve maternity care. We've pulled together the most promising opportunities for consumers, health professionals, hospital and health system administrators, purchasers, and quality experts.

Problem:Energy and resources are easily wasted reinventing the wheel.

Solution: There are many examples of high-performing maternity care services and successful quality improvement efforts. But it can be difficult to translate effective models into widespread practice. What's more: all change is local - stakeholders need tools and support to adapt innovations to their own settings and populations.

To foster, coordinate, and accelerate maternity care quality improvement, we put the tools and resources in one place and set up a way to connect individuals and organizations with common interests. The site features a directory of quality improvement projects that users can browse by Blueprint area or by quality improvement strategy. Are you improving maternity care quality where you live or work? Add your project to the directory.

Other resources include a list of quality improvement toolkits, links to obstetric and perinatal safety courses for health professionals, a directory of quality collaboratives, and a bibliography of the quality improvement literature.

One stop shopping!

Problem:Data to track and improve maternity quality are collected by many different agencies and reported on many different web sites.

Solution: We've created a Data Center where you can find statistical reports, interactive maps, and raw data files to help understand and improve maternity care quality. The data center is where you'll find Childbirth Connection's Listening to Mothers surveys,our continually- updated Facts & Figures page, and cost and payment data. We've also collected all provider-, facility-, and state-level maternity care data that we know is available, and provided links in one place. Last but not least, the data center includes our interactive maternity care map from Mapping Health, the winner of Childbirth Connection's Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.

We hope these resources help and inspire you to make change. If there is a quality improvement toolkit or resource that you think should be listed on the site, please let us know. If you have any other feedback about the new site, contact me at romano@childbirthconnection.org. And don't forget, if you are involved with a quality improvement project, there's someone else who wants to know about it, and might even want to replicate it. Please fill out our project submission form to share your story.

Posted by: Amy Romano, CNM

Published: April 18, 2011

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