Group Offers 11 Ways to Improve Maternity Care Quality, Value

Scope of covered services for maternity care. Identify an essential package of evidence based maternity care services for healthy childbearing women and newborns, and use determinations about comparative effectiveness of maternity services to make coverage decisions and improve quality of maternity care.

Coordination of maternity care across time, settings, and disciplines. Extend the healthcare home model to the full episode of maternity care, and develop local and regional collaborative quality improvement initiatives to improve clinical coordination at the community level.

Clinical controversies (home birth, vaginal birth after caesarean, vaginal breech and twin birth, elective induction, and maternal demand caesarean). Align practice patterns and views of both maternity caregivers and consumers with best current evidence about controversial clinical scenarios and evidence based maternity care.

Decision making and consumer choice. Design system incentives that reward provider and consumer behaviors that lead to healthy pregnancies and high-quality outcomes.

Scope, content, and availability of health professions education. Align funding for health professions education with national goals for high-quality, high-value maternity care, and workforce development.

Workforce composition and distribution. Define national goals for redesign of the U.S. maternity care workforce based on a primary care model with access to collaborative specialty care.

Development and use of health information technology. Increase interoperability across all phases and settings of maternity care by creating a core set of standardized data elements for electronic maternity care records.