Online Program

283337
Collaborate for healthy weight: Using quality improvement and integrating public health, primary care, and community-based organizations to promote healthy weight nationwide


Wednesday, November 6, 2013 : 8:30 a.m. - 8:45 a.m.

Cindy Hannon, MSW, NICHQ, Boston, MA
Marianne McPherson, PhD, National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality, Boston, MA
Shikha Anand, MD, MPH, National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality, Boston, MA
Rachel Vanderkruik, MSc, National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ), Boston, MA
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.”

Learning Areas:

Clinical medicine applied in public health
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Program planning
Provision of health care to the public
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
Describe the design of the Healthy Weight Collaborative, a two-phased quality improvement project aiming to promote healthy weight nationwide. Share results from the 49 teams participating in the Collaborative. Describe lessons learned regarding administering an entirely virtual quality improvement learning collaborative. Identify innovative and promising models to integrate public health, primary care, and community-based organizations in quality improvement teams to advance public health goals.

Keyword(s): Quality Improvement, Obesity

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I was the Analyst at NICHQ on the Collaborate for Healthy Weight Project. I have my Masters degree in public health and I concentrated in both Maternal and Child Health as well as Obesity Prevention and Epidemiology.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.