At Intermountain Health, we use a variety of means to help people live the healthiest lives possible, including applying and delivering on Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grants. These grants allow our community health team, along with community collaborators, to target some specific needs identified by the community.

Two grants to support moms in Montana

In southwest Montana, the rural area is known as a kind of maternity care desert. In our Intermountain Health community surveys, we received anonymous feedback indicating clear needs.

• 70% of local community respondents stated they had no access to maternal health services in their community.
• 85% of local community respondents reported difficulty accessing maternal health services.

We are using two HRSA grants to target these gaps in healthcare.

5 Peaks Coalition

One HRSA grant, named the 5 Peaks Coalition, aims to support pregnant and parenting women recovering from opioid use disorder. With close collaboration with the Southwest Montana Opioid and Substance Abuse Disorder Community Coalition, this team aims to build up a recovery community across the area, offering peer-to-peer support services.

“These individuals are in recovery themselves and have received specific training to provide peer support for someone who’s beginning their recovery journey as well,” said Sarah Diefendorf, Community Health Director and Leader of Government Grants.

The team is working to secure the peer support drop-in center, developing more relationships with providers, and collaborating with service providers.

The other grant component strives to reduce the stigma of substance use disorder. Collaborating with the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies nonprofit organization, our community health team launched an anti-stigma campaign to improve community education and awareness in a five-county area.

We are also helping to sponsor the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Perinatal Conference in early November. The three-day conference will focus on maternal mental health.

Maternal Health Connection

Another HRSA grant, now in its second year, helped create the Maternal Health Connection program. It aims to care for women in Granite and Powell counties from preconception through pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond through a care coordination system.

“In a rural state with a severe healthcare worker shortage and geographic expanse that forces pregnant women to travel vast distances to receive care, Montanans face an even greater risk as pregnancy complications are rising nationwide,” said Dr. Ibrahim Hammad, MD, Maternal and Fetal Medicine, Intermountain Health. “Pregnancy can be a difficult time in a woman’s life, and current economic and geographic challenges do not make it any simpler. This program is designed to bring maternal care closer to, if not to, the household.”

In communities such as Philipsburg, Deer Lodge, and Drummond, an expecting mom might need to travel 30 miles to see a primary care provider and more than 60 miles to see a specialist. This travel, when possible, often means time away from work and family and lost income. As a result of these barriers, many women choose to go without adequate prenatal or postpartum care.

Maternal Health Connection offers a hybrid of telehealth services with access to maternal-fetal specialists and OB-GYNs and in-person patient care delivered by certified nurse midwives (CNMs) and registered nurses in their communities and directly to them in their homes.

“Our mission is to improve maternal and neonatal outcomes in rural Montana. We know these families have no choice but to travel to Butte, Anaconda, and Missoula to receive care,” said Krystal Richards, RMOMS Grant Project Director for Intermountain Health. “I’m excited to bring choice to these families and ultimately develop a financially viable model that can be replicated in any maternal health desert.”

The program is funded by a grant from the Rural Maternity and Obstetrics Management Strategies Program, otherwise known as RMOMS, awarded by HRSA. We were one of four recipients nationwide in 2022 to receive an RMOMS award. The grant provides nearly $1 million annually over four years for $3.9 million to help increase access to obstetric services and improve outcomes such as preterm labor, low birth weight, infant mortality, and more in southwestern Montana.

We could not do this without excellent community collaborators, including Granite County Medical Center, Healthy Granite County Network, Healthy Montana Families, the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies organization, the Montana Medicaid Office, and the Southwest Montana Community Health Center.

Sustainability

Before applying for an HRSA grant, our community health team determines if the program can be sustainable. “We want to be very intentional in the grants we apply for to ensure that the money that we’re bringing in can really best reflect the needs of the communities that we’re working in and outlast the federal funding,” Diefendorf said. “The worst thing we could do is start a program that would end when the grant ends.”

We don’t just take this approach in Montana but for every HRSA application in our seven-state region. It’s a genuine community effort.

“We cannot be successful in this work without collective buy-in in the communities we serve,” Diefendorf said. “To get these grants, we must come to the table with established community relationships.”

These projects are supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of awards totaling $5 million with zero percentage financed with non-governmental sources. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit HRSA.gov.