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Maternal Health

AHRQ is committed to improving maternal health outcomes across the country. Our goal is to provide tools, data, research findings, and evidence-based recommendations to support clinicians, researchers, and health systems in improving maternal care.

Areas of Interest

AHRQ creates research, tools, and strategies to help health systems and frontline clinicians deliver high-quality, safe, high-value healthcare.

AHRQ Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) Program

  • The Evidence-based Practice Centers develop evidence reviews on medications, devices, procedures, and healthcare delivery arrangements to inform healthcare decisions by consumers, healthcare professionals, health systems, and policymakers.
  • Access a list of recent Maternal Health Reports

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendations

AHRQ Patient Safety Network (PSNet)

AHRQ's Patient Safety Network (PSNet) features a collection of the latest news and resources on patient safety, innovations and toolkits, opportunities for free Continuing Medical Education (CME), and trainings. The platform provides powerful searching and browsing capability, as well as the ability for users to customize the site around their interests.

AHRQ Diagnostic Safety

Starting in 2019, AHRQ supported the development of a series of papers on different diagnostic safety topics. The papers fall under two types—a "call to action" or a "state of the science."

Tools

AHRQ Safety Program for Perinatal Care (SPPC)

  • SPPC Toolkit Phase 1: Toolkit for Improving Perinatal Safety
  • SPPC Toolkit Phase 2: Toolkits To Reduce Hypertension in Pregnancy and Obstetric Hemorrhage
  • SPPC Toolkit Phase 3: Safety Program in Perinatal Care—Respectful Maternity Care: This newest phase of the SPPC program is focused on integrating evidence-based practices for promoting respectful maternity care with the toolkit and to align with the patient-centered TeamSTEPPS 3.0 updates in teamwork and communication science. It will be a publicly available resource and will be developed in conjunction with the Health Resources and Service Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) Survey on Prenatal and Childbirth Care Experiences in Ambulatory and Inpatient Settings. In 2023, AHRQ issued a Request for Information (RFI) to gather broad public input on the survey design.  Opportunities to gain additional stakeholder feedback are currently underway.

AHRQ's new beta software Maternal Health Indicators (MHIs) offers an accessible tool for examining maternal health data. It enables users to construct area-level measures of severe maternal morbidity using readily available administrative claims data. This tool aims to address healthcare quality in maternal health and identify opportunities to reduce complications during the peripartum period.

AHRQ data and analysis help healthcare decision makers understand how the U.S. healthcare system is working and where there are opportunities for improvement.

HCUP Recent Research Publications

Statistical Briefs/Data Briefs

Other Online Data and Tools