Collaborate for healthy weight: Using quality improvement and integrating public health, primary care, and community-based organizations to promote healthy weight nationwide

Obesity is one of the leading preventable causes of death nationwide, and it disproportionately affects disadvantaged and underserved communities. Since obesity is a multi-faceted public health issue, reversing the epidemic will require coordinated community-level efforts by diverse sets of stakeholders across multiple sectors, including public health. This session features results, promising models, and lessons learned from Collaborate for Healthy Weight, a project of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ), and its key activity, the Healthy Weight Collaborative. The Collaborative was a two-phased quality improvement (QI) learning collaborative that concluded in March 2012. We convened 49 multi-sector teams composed of representatives from primary care, public health, and community-based organizations use quality improvement to identify, test, and implement program and policy changes in their communities related to promoting healthy weight. In this session we will describe the Collaborative's overall design based on the Action Model to Achieve Healthy People 2020 Goals as well as provide specifics on measurement and change strategies from the Collaborative. We will share results in aggregate as well as feature examples from collaborative teams. We also will identify innovative and promising models that emerged from this initiative, considering public health content as well as lessons from administering a two-phased quality improvement initiative, one phase of which was conducted in an entirely virtual format. Finally, we will provide recommendations for future QI efforts especially as they apply to similar topic areas or settings. This is session 4 of 4 in a panel titled, “Applying quality improvement in public health systems for maternal and child health.”