Implementing a Maternal health and PRegnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone Community Implementation Program

Implementing a Maternal health and PRegnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone Community Implementation Program (IMPROVE-CIP) focuses on issues contributing to maternal death and severe illness, including mental health, substance use, psychosocial factors, and social and structural determinants of health.

IMPROVE-CIP is a program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Implementing a Maternal health and PRegnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone (IMPROVE) initiative launched in 2019 in response to high rates of pregnancy-related complications and deaths in the U.S.

The NIH IMPROVE initiative funds research to reduce preventable causes of death in pregnant people and improve health before, during, and after delivery. Like the broader IMPROVE initiative, IMPROVE-CIP focuses on health disparities and the people most affected by maternal death and severe maternal illness, including Black/African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic/Latino communities and rural and geographically underrepresented groups.

IMPROVE-CIP is supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Nursing Research, and the Office of Research on Women’s Health.

IMPROVE-CIP goals are:

• Use implementation science to bring known effective maternal health interventions into communities severely impacted by maternal health disparities.
• Empower the hardest-hit communities across the U.S. to be full partners in community-engaged implementation research to reduce disparities in maternal death and severe maternal illness.
• Identify and distribute effective application strategies that harness community strengths and knowledge to address factors (e.g., facilitators or barriers) that affect the adoption of evidence-based practices or interventions to improve maternal health.
• Strengthen partnerships between researchers and community-based organizations to support translating implementation-research evidence into usable tools and knowledge.