Improving Our Maternity Care Now Through Midwifery.

This contribution reprints the Executive Summary from a technical report issued by the National Partnership for Women & Families within its larger Improving Our Maternity Care Now project. This project identifies the priority of continuing the long, challenging work of maternity care system transformation, while also increasing access to high-performing care models that can help meet current urgent, dire needs for equitable high-quality care now. The Midwifery report is the first in a series of four reports on these care models, which share distinctive features. They reliably provide highly appropriate services that minimize both underuse of beneficial practices and overuse of unneeded, often harmful practices. They prioritize relationship-based, whole person care that builds trust, confidence and resilience and helps meet the varied needs of birthing families. They incorporate skills and knowledge to support the innate physiologic processes of birthing people and their fetuses/newborns. They achieve remarkable results for consequential outcomes relative to standard maternity care. And childbearing people greatly desire access to these forms of care relative to current access and use. Community-based versions offering trustworthy, respectful, culturally-congruent care are especially powerful. The midwifery report includes recommendations for federal policymakers, state policymakers, and private sector decision makers to increase access to midwifery care. It was carried out in partnership with the American College of Nurse-Midwives, the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives, and the National Black Midwives Alliance. Access the full project through https://www.nationalpartnership.org/improvingmaternitycare/. The project is supported by the Yellow Chair Foundation and is reprinted with permission. Reproduced with permission of the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Patients, consumers, and caregivers: the original data stewards.

INTRODUCTION: For patients and families, the issue of data quality is personal. When treatment decisions or research conclusions are based on incomplete or inaccurate information-a misdiagnosis, an incomplete medication list, the wrong demographic data-care safety, quality, and outcomes suffer-and patients and families suffer. OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANGE: Thanks in part to the power of health information technology, individuals have new opportunities to be part of the solution when it comes to assessing and improving data quality. Building on a framework for data quality, there are numerous opportunities for patients to be part of 'feedback loops' to understand and improve data quality are presented. FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE: As the source of patient-centered data, consumers have important roles to play in reviewing and confirming their own health information and should be engaged partners in efforts to understand and improve the quality of electronic health data.