EXCELLENT & EQUITABLE HEALTH OUTCOMES
Excellent and Equitable Health Outcomes is one of three overlapping teams within the All Children Thrive network. All Children Thrive knows that children need to be healthy in order to truly thrive. Unfortunately, inequities in health outcomes continue to exist, with persistent disparities by race, ethnicity, income, neighborhood, and more, and we believe this is unacceptable. One critical component of our work is a focus on eliminating these inequities to ensure that ALL kids have excellent and equitable health outcomes.
To achieve excellent and equitable health outcomes, we need: 1) a health system accountable for equity and capable of providing trusted care at the right place, the right time, and in the right way; 2) alignment of incentives, mission, and care; 3) transparent and available data; 4) integration of partners and interventions across the medical-social care continuum; 5) a learning system in place; 6) deep commitment to co-production; and 7) dismantling of harmful societal forces/policies and elevation of helpful societal forces/policies. To work together to focus on these factors, we recently launched the Health Equity Network.
Health Equity Network (HEN)
The Health Equity Network (HEN) is a group of multidisciplinary teams from different clinical areas across Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. HEN teams work to collaborate with families and community partners to:
Escalate identified systems issues in need of change;
Elevate shared drivers (e.g., decreased access to care; social determinants of health; historical/current racism) and shared solutions;
Provide opportunity for people to learn and collaboratively build an Equity Movement.
Teams do this through participation in Action Period Calls to develop quality improvement theory on common drivers and Solutions Labs for deep learnings on root causes of inequities.
Youth Mortality
While we focus on achieving equitable health outcomes, we are also aware that deep disparities exist in deaths among Cincinnati’s youth. We are collaborating with our healthcare and health department colleagues to identify challenges and gaps, and figure out together how to address them.
Regional response to COVID-19
In the Spring of 2020, our team lent expertise to the regional response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We supported health care, public health, schools, and community leaders with data, analytics, improvement, and public health expertise.
Related All Children Thrive Publications