An improvement approach for communities nationwide promoting healthy weight: The Healthy Weight Collaborative

The public health challenge: Obesity, the leading preventable cause of death nationwide, is a multi-faceted public health issue requiring a multi-sector approach. Disadvantaged and underserved communities are disproportionately impacted by obesity. Reversing this trend will require a concerted, collaborative effort by diverse stakeholders. Public health and primary care must engage the community to use existing evidence and innovations to inspire action to improve health status. An improvement-driven approach: The Healthy Weight Collaborative is a national, innovative, data-driven quality improvement effort to share and spread promising evidence-based, clinical and community-based interventions to prevent and treat obesity for children and families. It is a focal activity of the Prevention Center for Healthy Weight, a project of the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality in cooperation with HRSA, funded out of the Prevention and Public Health Fund created by the Affordable Care Act. This 12-month collaborative brings together 50+ teams from communities nationwide; each multi-sector team represents stakeholders from public health, the community (e.g., schools, transportation), and clinical care. This session will detail the aims and activities of as well as the improvement science driving this learning collaborative. We will review the theoretical framework developed for this initiative, the Community Action Model to Promote Health, based upon the Action Model to Achieve HP2020. We will also review our improvement model, which builds on proven approaches for rapidly spreading successful changes. We will overview the project's theory of change and measurement strategy for leveraging improvement science to promote healthy weight in communities nationwide.