Putting QI into Action: Association of Maternal and Child Health QI 101 Program

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• Last Updated on Wednesday, 15 July 2015 21:54

In December 2014, the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP) began their QI journey with CPHQ.  As a national resource for public health leaders and advocates, AMCHP aimed to improve staff capacity to use and teach others to use QI tools in their daily work.  To learn to apply the tools, AMCHP staff worked on three projects aimed to:

• Improve the submission of best practices to Innovation Station, AMCHP’s searchable database of emerging, promising and best practices in MCH,
• Improve the tracking of emerging issues, and
• Improve the efficiency and consistency of planning and executing webinars.

Over the last six months, teams have participated in four educational webinars, two, on-site working sessions (at AMCHP), and monthly coaching calls with CPHQ.  Each team created an aim statement, collected measures, created a value stream map (see example in photo below), and identified and tested specific changes to improve the process.   Table 1 provides a summary of the changes each project has made.

“The passion and excitement of the AMCHP staff to learn QI and improve their processes was so refreshing.  It was such a pleasure to work with such a dedicated group who truly understood the importance of continuously improving their programs.  Their overall enthusiasm to improve maternal and child health was evident in their work.  Each team diligently worked to improve their internal process so they could provide the best services and programs to their members,” said Amanda Cornett, Associate Director of CPHQ.

The teams have made remarkable progress over the last six months and have started developing and implementing plans to sustain their improvements going forward (e.g. identifying process owners, incorporating new processes within all staff job descriptions, tracking metrics on the organizational dashboard, training all staff, etc.).  The changes made have begun to improve efficiency within AMCHP and will ultimately have a national impact.

“Beyond improvements in these three core services we provide to our members, we are seeing mini-QI projects emerging and more cross team collaborative work among the AMCHP staff.” Lacy Fehrenbach, Director of Programs at AMCHP.

Feedback on the program has been positive with participants noting that the training effectively equipped staff with the knowledge, skills and tools to accomplish lasting improvements in current QI projects. Participants also indicated that they are now applying what was learned to other improvement efforts within the organization and are sharing tools with colleagues.

 

Table 1: Summary of AMCHP QI Projects

Project Focus	Aim	Changes Made* (teams continue to collect data to measure improvement)
Best Practice Submissions	Improve the timeliness and efficiency of the best practices submission process in order to increase quarterly submissions into Innovation Station.	Created an elevator speech to increase staff’s confidence in discussing the best practice submission process. Identified a “Best Practice Ambassador” within each program to act as the point person to educate and encourage members to submit best practices. Updated and refined the submission form. Updated and refined the expert review form.
Emerging Issues Tracking	Develop a standardize process for tracking and reporting technical assistance requests in order to identify maternal child health emerging issue.  The data will help forecast AMCHP members’ needs and help shape AMCHP programs.	Created a tracking database. Developed a process for tracking and reporting requests. Created standard work and instructions for how to enter requests. Created standard work and instruction for how to identify trends within the database.
Virtual Engagement Planning and Execution	Improve the efficiency and consistency of planning and executing webinars to ensure a satisfactory experience of AMCHP members.	Created a comprehensive webinar planning toolkit that includes: A step by step process for planning and executing webinars, Instructions for creating webinars using adult learning principles, Best practices for planning logistics of webinars, and Instructions for working with faculty to prepare for webinars.