The Healthy Weight Collaborative: quality improvement methods promoting healthy weight.

Promoting healthy weight requires innovative approaches and a concerted response across all sectors of society. This commentary features the framework guiding the Healthy Weight Collaborative, a two-phased quality improvement (QI) learning collaborative and key activity of the Collaborate for Healthy Weight initiative. Multi-sector teams from primary care, public health, and community-based organizations use QI to identify, test, and implement program and policy changes in their communities related to promoting healthy weight. We describe the Collaborative's overall design based on the Action Model to Achieve Healthy People 2020 Goals and our approach of applying QI methods to advance implementation of sustainable ways to promote healthy weight and healthy equity. We provide specifics on measurement and change strategies as well as examples of Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles from teams participating in Phase 1 of the Collaborative. These teams will serve as leaders for sustainable, positive change in their communities.

Improving care for depression: performance measures, outcomes and insights from the Health Disparities Collaboratives.

This paper reports 10 measures, outcomes, and insights from HRSA Depression Health Disparities Collaboratives, representing attempts to accelerate evidence-based guidelines into practice. The authors analyze interviews with leadership of high-performing centers. Monthly data was submitted on 38,000 patients from 94 centers. Regression analyses were conducted to identify process measures predictive of better outcomes. Results indicated that these 10 measures of care were effective in guiding and quantifying improved outcomes. One measure, early and sustained response (ESR), proved particularly useful as it reflects long term outcomes. Regression analyses identified one process measure (Patient Health Questionnaire Reassessment) strongly associated with improved clinical outcomes (n=37, R2=44%). Interviews identified 18 process changes deemed pivotal for meaningful change. In sum, well-designed approaches utilizing proven improvement methodologies resulted in substantial enhancements in depression care. This approach and these measures, especially ESR and PHQ Reassessment, may improve depression care in other under-served settings.