Emerging lessons from the Healthy Weight Collaborative: Improvement data informing healthier communities

Background: The Healthy Weight Collaborative is an innovative, data-driven quality improvement effort to share and spread promising evidence-based, team-oriented clinical and community-based interventions to prevent and treat obesity for children and families. In 2011, 50+ multi-sector teams came together to implement improvement-based approaches in their communities nationwide, with a particular focus on teams representing underserved communities. Methods: The collaborative employs the Breakthrough Series methodology, a quality improvement approach for rapidly spreading successful changes. This 12-month collaborative includes three “learning session” meetings interspersed with “action periods” (i.e., rapid-cycle testing and reporting data from interventions in local environments). Teams meet, either face-to-face or virtually, three times a year, and receive support from regional technical assistance teams as well as from national faculty with expertise in prevention and treatment of obesity and in improvement science. Multi-sector teams are supported by an online learning community that allows participating teams to upload and share results, dialogue with peers and mentor each other to achieve results. Collaborative team improvements are tracked and shared for the mutual benefit of all community teams participating in the collaborative. Results: In this session, we present emerging lessons from the first 6 months of implementation. This timeframe captures two learning sessions and two action periods during which teams implement and measure small tests of change towards their aim of making strides towards improving healthy weight in their communities. Data include teams' aims, standardized measures used to track improvement, quality improvement data, and process-based evaluation data on emerging lessons on implementation.