OUR NETWORK

What is All Children Thrive?

All Children Thrive is a Learning Network in Southwest Ohio dedicated to creating a community where our children can thrive. As a Learning Network, we utilize a quality improvement science to examine our current systems where families live, work, and play, and identify opportunities to change and improve those systems.

By working with families and community partners, building trust, and listening to the needs of those we serve, we have already made significant strides in several areas including: 

• improving infant mortality and prematurity by transforming prenatal care across the county 

• reducing excess days spent in the hospital instead of in school or at play 

• increasing significantly the number of young children receiving all preventive services including immunizations, dental, vision, hearing and literacy, speech, social-emotional and behavioral care by age 5 

• supporting children reading proficiently or better by third grade 

All Children Thrive Strategies

• We set a vision and look for like-minded community members to join us as we focus keenly on outcomes and results – driven by a strong measurement framework and supported by a data management and analytic core. We catalyze community members around a common goal, building capacity for improvement as we go.  

• We pursue strategic city-wide multisector partnerships to address the many complex determinants of health that lie outside of health care. These partnerships include Cincinnati Public Schools, Cincinnati Health Department, Hamilton County Job and Family Services, and more. We build the capability of our partners to deliver on results by teaching quality improvement methods and coaching community leaders in QI.  

• We keep children and families at the center of our work. We collaborate with families to co-produce and co-design solutions. Their support and continual involvement in this work helps communities cultivate change at a powerful local level.  

• We use the IHI’s Model for Improvement. This defined approach allows our teams to learn more effectively and achieve results faster. It is being utilized by all of the teams across our network. We use a guided roadmap for these teams that supports improvement that includes answering the Model for Improvement’s three big questions. This sets the team up to then test the best ideas in discrete, rapid plan-do-study-act cycles. 

Our Partner Supported Results

Annual Inpatient Bed Days

Through a multi-disciplinary quality improvement effort, All Children Thrive was able to reduce the number of days children from our Avondale neighborhood spend in the hospital from an average of 167 to 105 bed days / 1000.  This means kids are spending less days in the hospital - and more time in school, at play, and in extracurricular activities.  In addition to using data to focus our actions, additional solutions included (but not limited to) deployment of community health workers, morning huddles to review and address social needs of admitted patients, coordinating care with school nurses, and following up with patients after discharge. 

Infant Mortality

Knowing that premature birth is one of the leading causes of infant mortality, All Children Thrive and its partners set out to tackle prematurity.  We selected Avondale as the first neighborhood of focus because of its high rates of infant mortality, the equity gap between black and not black infant mortality rate, and the proximity to Cincinnati Children’s. 

After working intensely in two large birth hospitals and Every Child Succeeds, we partnered with Avondale residents and organizations to use quality improvement to find every pregnant woman in the neighborhood, connect her to services, and assure that she received evidence based care for a healthy delivery. The rates of early preterm birth dropped and as a result, Avondale moved further to the right on the frequency distribution for smaller levels of infant mortality.

Cincinnati Public School Results

English Language Arts Proficiency