Washington, DC – In May, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced that Joy Burkhard, MBA was selected to serve as an expert advisor for their Cross-Sectional Innovation to Improve Rural Postpartum Mental Health Challenge.

The challenge aims to drive both proposal and narrative submissions, allowing the initiative to highlight success stories in rural postpartum mental health and encourage future innovative approaches.

A new Center for Disease Control (CDC) study finds that around 1 in 8 women report experiencing symptoms of maternal depression. The analysis, which looked at 2018 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Survey (PRAMS) data from 30 states and Puerto Rico, found that rates of “postpartum depression” symptoms ranged from a little under 10% in Illinois to almost 24% in Mississippi.

What I’m reading this month not surprisingly focuses on how the pandemic is affecting mood and also what we might be able to do about it. Interestingly, the Federal Agency AHRQ is also now more aggressively recommending a standardized depression screening/measurement approach to allow for more compatibility and quality improvement efforts. As a health systems quality improvement practitioner, I also believe this is critical and controversial.