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Carol Sakala

CMS’s Transforming Maternal Health Model: A Roadmap For States

, | May 8, 2025

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Despite some recent improvements in maternal mortality – which, to be clear, did not extend to Black women – the United States continues to be the most dangerous wealthy country for giving birth, and large proportions of childbearing families still lack the support they need to thrive. CMS’s recently launched Transforming Maternal Health, or TMaH (“tee-mah”), model is a comprehensive framework for addressing this crisis. TMaH offers a roadmap for all states and stakeholders to advance maternal health, whether or not they formally participate in this ten-year Innovation Center program.

Recognizing the transformational potential of the TMaH framework, the National Partnership for Women & Families released a playbook to support all state Medicaid agencies and their partners in successfully implementing the model elements that will improve outcomes for moms and babies. The playbook provides implementers with the “why” and the “how” of both mandatory and optional TMaH elements – including concrete checklists, specific resources, and the evidence about their value. The playbook can be used by various stakeholders working with state Medicaid agencies to transform maternity care, including CMS, state legislators, governors, Medicaid managed care health plans, community-based organizations, birth justice leaders and other advocates, clinical provider groups, hospitals and birth centers, perinatal quality collaboratives, philanthropy, and journalists.

Continue reading this blog post at Health Affairs Forefront.

Attribution: Carol Sakala and Megan Burns, CMS’s Transforming Maternal Health Model: A Roadmap For States, Health Affairs Forefront, May 7, 2025, https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/cms-s-transforming-maternal-health-model-roadmap-states
Copyright ©️2015 Health Affairs by Project HOPE – The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.

About the Author

Carol Sakala

Carol Sakala

Carol Sakala led maternal health and maternity care programming at the National Partnership for Women & Families. She is a long-time maternity care advocate, educator, researcher, author and policy analyst, with a continuous focus on meeting the needs and interests of childbearing women and their families.

Sakala sits on advisory bodies and work groups focusing on payment reform, performance measurement and other ways to improve the quality of maternity care. She has been an investigator on all national Listening to Mothers surveys (2002-) and was principal investigator of the most recent Listening to Mothers in California survey. She helps create or commission foundational resources for the field on such topics as the cost of having a baby, maternity care and liability, evidence-based maternity care, effectiveness of labor support, hormonal physiology of childbearing and performance of the nation’s maternity care system.

Sakala led the National Partnership's convening and collaboration of 17 national leaders resulting in the consensus report, Blueprint for Advancing High-Value Maternity Care Through Physiologic Childbearing. Through her guidance, the National Partnership maintains childbirthconnection.org, which features results of systematic reviews to support childbearing women in informed maternity care decision making and helps them navigate the maternity care system. She was a Pew Health Policy fellow at Boston University, where she received her doctorate in health policy through the University Professors Program, and has master's degrees from the University of Utah and the University of Chicago.

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