A new study published in The Milbank Quarterly provides insight from leaders, clinicians, and care coordinators for six of the 17 Medicaid ACOs in Massachusetts between 2018-2024, finding that these ACOs were able to improve the quality of patients’ maternal care by intentionally and strategically incorporating new maternal metrics and initiatives mandated in their contracts, as well as by providing the necessary resources and infrastructure to meet these requirements. Mandating specific maternal health initiatives, from timely prenatal care to postpartum depression screening, motivated the ACOs to adapt or develop programs that align with maternal health goals. 

In a Policy Forum, Noam Angrist and colleagues discuss a science-backed research agenda for understanding how to successfully implement educational programs at scale. “The frontier of education research and practice is to improve implementation,” Angrist et al. write. “There is growing evidence on what works – now we need to translate that evidence into action and systematically study the process, so that we can do it repeatedly and at increasing scale to achieve effective, equitable, and enduring learning for all.” Although most children around the globe attend school, learning outcomes remain low in many parts of the world. A growing body of research has identified programs that can improve learning, yet interventions that succeed in small, controlled studies often lose effectiveness when implemented at scale and by governments. According to the authors, a major obstacle is that education research rarely measures how faithfully programs are implemented or how widely they are adopted, making it difficult to determine whether poor outcomes result from flaws in the program itself or from shortcomings in its implementation. Here, Angrist et al. call for stronger implementation science in global education, modeled partly on efforts in health care, to close the gap between research discoveries and real-world practice. The authors propose a four-stage framework to turn educational research into effective, equitable practice at scale: efficacy trials, effectiveness trials, policy plans, and large-scale implementation. This approach emphasizes testing whether interventions work across diverse populations and real-world settings, as well as whether they are affordable and sustainable. “We hope the implementation science for global education agenda motivates a shift toward research that informs the decisions and challenges that confront implementers and government decision-makers,” the authors write. “By ensuring that more science makes it into implementation and that more implementation is made scientific, implementation science can support the ultimate goal of all children learning.”

A new report from Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC) and the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health offers an in-depth examination of how individuals navigate, survive and attempt to exit homelessness. Titled “Without a Map: A Lived Experience Study of the Paths People Create Through Homelessness," the publication serves as the second and final part of the Multnomah County-funded Pathways study. The first part of the study, released in April 2026, established through 541 surveys that 98% of unhoused participants want permanent housing. This final installment combines those survey findings with 29 in-depth journey-mapping interviews to show how people navigate homelessness and homeless services, what helps them move toward housing, what gets in the way and the many ways in which progress can sometimes stall or unravel. 

Healthcare costs for women reporting childbirth-related PTSD were over twice as high as those for women without symptoms during the period from 6 to 12 months after birth, according to a new report from City St George’s, University of London on the economic impact of postnatal PTSD on the NHS.

Whereas adults rely on streamlined internal mind maps to carry out their daily routines, young children’s brains appear to be wired for distraction. According to a review paper published recently in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, what might look and feel like pure chaos — or worse, obstinance — is an important window into how growing minds think and learn through exploration.