Building a Culture of Quality to Demonstrate Value and Improve Equity

Infant mortality in the United States is a persistent and complex public health challenge, particularly in southern states. Nationally, for every 1,000 live births, more than six infants die in the first year of life, and many are preventable; in the southern states this represents more than 5,000 excess infant deaths between 2007 and 2009. Further, significant disparities persist. In 2012, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) launched a Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (CoIIN) to reduce infant mortality, engaging the 13 states in HRSA service regions  IV/VI.  From 2012-2014, states learned from one another, received support for the application of quality improvement (QI) processes, and tracked progress toward established benchmarks on shared strategies.

With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AMCHP developed the Birth Outcomes Collaborative that builds off the existing infrastructure of the CoIIN to reduce infant mortality across states in regions  IV/VI, by facilitating the spread of evidence based practices/innovations to improve birth outcomes/reduce infant mortality; increase the use and application of QI methods to address birth outcomes, and demonstrate the value of multidisciplenary investments in MCH interventions to improve birth outcomes.

This workshop will highlight select states experiences in the Collaborative to improve public health/health care processes and precursors to birth outcomes, using collaborative learning and QI to leverage the work of CoIIN.  Specifically, state MCH Directors will share progress and lessons learned to address their priority strategies through performing economic analyses for interventions and strategies identified through CoIIN.