Designing scalable impact for maternal and child health

How Spring Impact supported NICHQ in strengthening partnerships and systems to deliver lasting improvements for mothers, children, and families' well-being.

Scale Strategy | Scale Model | Lean Testing | Maternal and child health and well-being | United States of America

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.

Challenge

In fall 2024, Spring Impact partnered with NICHQ to determine how the Community-Centered Hospital Initiative (CCHI) could achieve sustainable scale. While the initiative showed promise — testing new ways of working and elevating community voices to improve outcomes for Black parents and infants — uncertainty remained about which partners, implementation model, and scaling strategy would deliver lasting impact.

When federal funding cuts threatened that momentum, CCHI needed clarity fast. Spring Impact helped test assumptions, generate evidence, and design a practical pathway for growth that could thrive despite limited resources.

20+

Lean learning experiments

across governance, partnerships

& sustainability

 

 

100%

Pilot communities engaged

in testing and refining

the implementation model

 

 

1

Strategic pivot driven

by evidence generated

through implementation

 

 

Our Approach

To set NICHQ’s Community-Centered Hospital Initiative (CCHI) up for lasting impact, our work focused on three key areas.

Define a path to scale

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.

Test critical assumptions

We helped the team identify key hypotheses and run structured lean learning loops, turning uncertainty into evidence-backed choices about where to focus next.

Embed lean practices

By integrating Lean Impact methods, CCHI can now test, adapt, and improve more quickly, while spreading these capabilities across the wider NICHQ team.

The greatest value of this work wasn’t proving our original hypothesis—it was giving us the confidence to change it. Lean testing allowed us to follow the evidence and design a stronger model for scale.

— Dr. Stacy Scott, Executive Director, Community-Centered Hospital Initiative

Outcomes

Shared vision unlocked – The CCHI team gained a clear, practical understanding of what a community-centred hospital model could look like in action, and how to build it with meaningful input from community members.

Partnership readiness revealed – Early signals of alignment and gaps between hospitals, PQCs, and CBOs were identified, enabling smarter, more strategic engagement with partners.

Stronger foundation established – Internal infrastructure was strengthened, positioning the team to confidently move into the next stage of model development and scale.

NEED SUPPORT ON YOUR OWN PATH TO SCALE?

Press enter to search or esc to cancel