How Spring Impact supported NICHQ in strengthening partnerships and systems to deliver lasting improvements for mothers, children, and families' well-being.
Scale Strategy & Model | Lean Testing | Maternal and Child Health and Well-being
The National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to driving measurable, sustainable improvements in children’s health.
By partnering with communities, health care providers, policymakers, and public health leaders, NICHQ advances solutions that improve outcomes and strengthen systems of care for mothers, children, and families.
Decisions about governance, partnerships, implementation & sustainability were informed by structured learning tests, enabling confidence and clearer decision-making
All six pilot communities fully participated in testing and
refining the implementation model, to ensure it serves
real needs rather than
assumptions
The evidence
generated through
implementation
informed a major
redesign of CCHI’s
scale strategy
To set NICHQ’s Community-Centered Hospital Initiative (CCHI) up for lasting impact, our work focused on three key areas.
Together we built CCHI’s first learning roadmap, capturing early progress and shaping a practical model. This included defining the roles of future partners and payers, the value they’d gain, and how quality could be assured at scale.
We helped the team identify key hypotheses and run structured lean learning loops, turning uncertainty into evidence-backed choices about where to focus next.
By integrating Lean Impact methods, CCHI can now test, adapt, and improve more quickly, while spreading these capabilities across the wider NICHQ team.
— Dr. Stacy Scott, Executive Director, Community-Centered Hospital Initiative
