Maternal-Child Surveillance and Partnerships for Action, Results, and Knowledge

CDC proposes to allocate funds to implement Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) DD-27-0028, Maternal Child Surveillance and Partnerships for Action, Results, and Knowledge. This NOFO will integrate maternal child health surveillance with national partnership activities to address key public health challenges including alcohol use during pregnancy, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs), neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), and cytomegalovirus (CMV).

The NOFO will support entities with appropriate data authority and infrastructure to initiate, sustain, enhance, and/or expand clinical surveillance systems capturing data on pregnant women, infants, and/or children. Funding will prioritize improving data quality and enabling timely reporting and dissemination of evolving outcome data.

Funded entities participating in clinical surveillance will monitor prenatal exposures such as alcohol use and polysubstance use during pregnancy as well as conditions with significant public health impact such as FASDs, NAS, congenital CMV, and other outcomes. CDC will also fund entities with informatics expertise to provide technical assistance to funded entities conducting clinical surveillance, improve data quality, and support dissemination of data through visualizations. Furthermore, this clinical surveillance network could be leveraged to address emerging, reemerging, and persistent public health threats to pregnant women and infants.

In addition, this NOFO will invest in national partnership activities to prevent FASDs and improve early identification as well as support and care of affected infants and children. Activities may include serving as a national FASD resource; advancing evidence-based messaging; building clinical capacity through a holistic, lifespan approach; addressing regional, state, local, and/or tribal jurisdiction gaps; advancing coordination and translation of activities; and evaluating program strategies.

Together, these activities establish a combined framework that emphasizes data to action approaches that translate high quality surveillance data into prevention strategies, pathways to referral and support, and improved outcomes.