ACHIA Projects and Learning Collaboratives

ACHIA serves as a resource to pediatric and family medicine practices and others who wish to improve the care they deliver to infants, children and adolescents.  ACHIA works with practices by encouraging, supporting, facilitating and teaching practice teams to use effective quality improvement techniques and methods.  ACHIA subscribes to the “Model for Improvement” that asks practices to incorporate three questions into the culture of their practice:

               1. What are we trying to accomplish?

               2. How will we know that a change is an improvement?

               3. What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

ACHIA encourages practices to use “rapid cycles of change,” that include the: Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) framework for quality improvement.

One model that ACHIA and others have used for practice based quality improvement is the Learning Collaborative (LC).  A Learning Collaborative is based on the belief that a group of practices working together will be more effective than a single practice working alone.  See the sidebar for a listing of our learning collaboratives for more information.