Having a baby is tough enough on its own. But when a pregnant or postpartum patient finally brings up a mental health concern, their provider has a small window to respond with clarity, confidence, and care. Too often, that moment is met with uncertainty: scattered resources, inconsistent information, and not enough time to track down what’s actually helpful.
In our early conversations with the KyCOMPASS team, we kept coming back to the same problem:
Many perinatal women in Kentucky face barriers to accessing psychiatric care because of limited awareness, stigma, and a lack of clear, centralized resources. At the same time, healthcare providers struggle to deliver consistent, accessible, and culturally competent mental health education to support these patients effectively. That gap in knowledge and connectivity leads to delays in care, higher mental health risks, and poorer outcomes for both mother and child.
Across the country, more than 30 states have launched similar perinatal psychiatry access programs to help close that gap. KyCOMPASS (Kentucky Consultation & Outreach for Maternal Psychiatry and Support Services) brings that same model of expertise and support to Kentucky.
Their mission is to engage perinatal stakeholders across the state to improve mental health care and outcomes for mothers and infants through psychiatric access, education, and resource collaboration. Their vision is to expand health professionals’ capacity to support perinatal mental health and substance use disorder care with timely, trusted guidance.
Our job was to help translate that mission into a digital experience: a new KyCOMPASS website that gives providers a clear starting point, connects them with real-time psychiatric consultation and education, and can grow alongside the program as it expands across the state.
One important thing about KyCOMPASS: it isn’t a direct-to-patient site. It’s built exclusively for Kentucky healthcare providers who are caring for pregnant and postpartum individuals with mental health or substance use concerns.
That includes:
These providers are often the first to notice when something isn’t quite right, or the ones patients finally open up to when they’re struggling. They don’t always have a perinatal psychiatrist down the hall. They might be in a rural clinic, a busy hospital, or a community health setting where time is short and mental health resources are scattered across different systems.
For them, KyCOMPASS needed to do a few things really well:
That focus on providers first shaped almost every decision we made about the site’s structure, content, and design.
From the start, it was clear that KyCOMPASS needed more than a simple brochure site. The team wanted something that busy providers could move through quickly, without hunting for information, and they also needed the flexibility to keep content fresh as the program grows. New trainings, updated language, additional resources—none of that should require opening a ticket or waiting on a developer.
At APAX, we’ve done a lot of work with Drupal over the years. It’s been a bit of a calling card for us, especially with larger clients who need a strong content management system behind the scenes. For KyCOMPASS, we still wanted that strength on the CMS side, but we also wanted more freedom on the frontend than a traditional Drupal theme would give us.
That led us to a decoupled architecture for this project: a Drupal CMS on the back end and a Next.js frontend styled with Tailwind on the front end. In simple terms, Drupal handles the content and structure, while Next.js gives us more control over how that content is presented to providers.
Drupal gives the KyCOMPASS team a solid, flexible way to model content and keep their resources up to date. Pairing it with a modern React-based frontend lets us shape the provider experience more directly and iterate on the design over time, without disrupting the underlying content.
KyCOMPASS ended up being a great place to bring those two worlds together: the reliability and structure of Drupal with the design freedom and performance of a modern frontend. That balance—between what providers see and what the team maintains day to day—shaped a lot of our decisions as we built the site.
Because KyCOMPASS is a brand-new program, the site isn’t just a nicer version of something that existed before. It’s the foundation for how providers across Kentucky will discover and engage with the support KyCOMPASS offers.
The program brings near real-time psychiatric consultation, individualized trainings for clinics and hospitals, comprehensive provider resources, and ongoing educational opportunities into one place. The site gives that work a clear, usable front door. It makes it easier for providers to understand what KyCOMPASS can do for them, how to get in touch, and where to start when they’re supporting someone through pregnancy and the postpartum period.
Early feedback from providers has been encouraging:
“Having the ability to call for a consult in complex cases will be a huge asset to my practice.”
— Kentucky OB/GYN
“KyCOMPASS makes it easier to connect moms with the resources they deserve. As someone who has focused on perinatal mental health for the past 3 years, I’m thrilled to see this program shining a light on maternal mental health in Kentucky.”
— Perinatal mental health provider
For me, that’s the exciting part. The technology and architecture matter, but only because they support something bigger: a program that helps more providers feel confident in complex mental health situations, and more families get the care they deserve during a critical season of life.
KyCOMPASS is just getting started. As the program grows, the site will grow with it: new trainings, expanded resource libraries, more ways for providers to connect and learn from each other. Under the hood, the decoupled Drupal and Next.js setup gives the KyCOMPASS team a flexible platform to build on rather than a one-off project that’s hard to change.
From our side, this project was a chance to try a new technical path on a mission that really matters: investing in perinatal providers to support families in Kentucky. I’m proud of what we’ve launched together and excited to see how KyCOMPASS continues to impact providers and patients across the state.
If you’re working on something similar—whether it’s a new program like KyCOMPASS or an existing service that needs a clearer digital front door—we’d love to talk about how the right platform can support your mission and your team for the long run.
