Breaking Down Infant Mortality: How to Use the CoIIN Framework to Identify and Prioritize Your State's MCH Efforts to Save Babies' Lives

According to 2010 statistics, 6.15 babies out of every 1,000 born in the U.S. die before their first birthday. This compares to an average of 5.0 babies for all other industrialized nations. Worse still, American minority populations are disproportionately affected. Since 2013, the Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (CoIIN) to Reduce Infant Mortality has helped states reduce infant mortality and improve birth outcomes through quality improvement, collaborative learning and collaborative innovation. In 2014, the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality developed a framework for MCH leaders to use in narrowing down and determining their strategic priorities for reducing infant mortality. The CoIIN framework is a tool that presents many of the primary factors contributing to infant mortality in the United States and enables states, MCH officials and all stakeholders to identify where to focus their efforts. The framework breaks down the complex, multifaceted issue of infant mortality into practical, achievable steps for improvement—first, by organizing actions by periods of engagement and then by specific strategies. The strength of the CoIIN and its framework is in bringing together and uniting stakeholders from all levels—federal, state, private and public sectors—to collaborate and coordinate their work around a common aim in a rapid cycle timeframe (18-24 months) to accelerate saving babies’ lives. Given the framework’s success in assisting MCH leaders to prioritize initiatives to reduce infant mortality, it has potential to serve as a model for other public health initiatives and be of interest to other public health authorities.