Here’s one issue blue and red states agree on: Preventing deaths of expectant and new mothers

The “Lost Mothers” project highlighted a number of reasons the U.S. has fallen behind other countries, including a greater focus on the health of the baby than of the mother, treatment guidelines that vary from one doctor or hospital to the next, and government failures to collect accurate data and to study maternal deaths and near-deaths to understand how they might be prevented.

Maternal mortality review committees can play a key role in this process, public health experts say, by identifying pregnancy-related deaths that might otherwise be overlooked, analyzing the factors contributing to those deaths, and translating the lessons into policy changes. That’s what happens in Great Britain, where a national committee investigates every maternal death and the findings help set women’s health policy across the country.

As recently as 2016, only about half the states had such panels. The number has been growing quickly, said Andria Cornell, senior program manager for women’s health and maternal health lead at the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs, a nonprofit advocacy group.

“This is a time of unprecedented political and social will for establishing maternal mortality review committees,” she said. “We’ve definitely come to a tipping point.”

Cornell credited two forces for driving the change: journalism focused on maternal deaths and a national project led by AMCHP, the Centers for Disease Control and the CDC Foundation.

With money from Merck for Mothers, a charitable initiative created by the pharmaceutical giant, the project has funded a web portal that provides information on starting and improving review committees and a tool, the Maternal Mortality Review Information Application, that shows jurisdictions how to standardize data collection from review panels so that it’s comparable from one state to the next.

Review committees do have limitations. Many are understaffed and poorly funded, with limited authority to dig deeply into systemic problems or implement meaningful reforms. It generally takes several years for them to produce their reports, in part because committee members — including doctors, public health experts, medical examiners, and the like — have other demands on their time and aren’t compensated.