The Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) has launched a new yearlong initiative to better understand the impact of toxic stress on pregnancy.
The effort’s goal is to help advance research on maternal health equity and is made possible by a funding award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Under the guidance of a steering committee made up of Black women with lived experience, ACHP plans to conduct a literature review and identify gaps in research on maternal health. It will then convene cross-sector stakeholders, including researchers, to develop the findings into an actionable research agenda.
ACHP plans to act on the findings, which could mean more community engagement and interventions, provider education and outreach and tracking new data.
Despite the well-established fact that disparities in maternal health are significantly worse for Black women, what's often overlooked in the conversation is that mental health is often a major contributor, according to Jennifer Lee, M.D., chief medical officer at ACHP.
For example, Black women experience postpartum depression at starkly higher rates than the general population. Looking at toxic stress and its impacts opens the door to better understanding social determinants like structural racism, Lee told Fierce Healthcare.
“ACHP looks forward to learning from Black women who are leaders in their communities and experts on the true drivers of maternal and mental health equity—because they live them every day,” Ceci Connolly, ACHP’s president and CEO, said in a press release.
The initiative’s steering committee will be led by Kay Matthews, founder and executive director of the Shades of Blue Project, a nonprofit focused on maternal health equity. “Improving maternal health outcomes requires a focus on maternal mental health,” Matthews said in the announcement. “That is not optional, and I am very pleased to be partnering with ACHP to prioritize crucial areas in which health plans and others in the industry can accelerate their efforts to achieve an integrated, holistic approach to the maternal health and mental health needs of people in communities like mine.”
There are untapped opportunities to glean better population health insights during this effort thanks to ACHP’s visibility into health data, Lee said.
“Payers are able to see data from not just individuals in many cases, but oftentimes whole families are covered by the same payer. So they can develop a whole picture of what’s happening to a family unit,” she said. Being able to track members over time can also reveal critical insights. ACHP plans are aware of the importance of these capabilities, though they have not yet been fully leveraged, Lee said: “It will be a data journey.”
ACHP recently participated in another maternal health initiative, the "Raising the Bar" project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which created a maternal health measure set and framework to advance equity.
Meanwhile, at the start of the month, PCORI launched a multiyear initiative offering $50 million to advance the adoption of new clinical research into healthcare practice. It has chosen 42 health systems to participate.