Initiatives
Improved Hearing Screening and Intervention Services (IHSIS)
A series of collaborative improvement projects to increase the rate of documented follow-up and intervention services for infants with hearing loss.
Status: Complete
The multiple collaborative projects ran from 2010 to 2013.
- Who: Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) offices representing 28 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, in collaboration with parent partners, audiologists and other healthcare professionals and advocates.
- Funder: This project was funded by the Health Resources and Service Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau.
- Our Role: Facilitated Breakthrough Series learning collaboratives to apply quality improvement methodology to improve the systems of care for children with hearing loss.
What IHSIS Project Participants Say
Working with NICHQ has been a very rewarding experience … A partnership with families has been a hallmark of what the Maternal and Child Health Bureau has done for years, but NICHQ really demonstrated how important those partnerships are.
Being involved with NICHQ has been a career-changing and life-altering experience in many ways. Quality improvement methodology is not additive to my work, it influences how I do my daily work.
At the beginning we thought that it'd be another project or another thing to do in our list of things we're supposed to do. But actually what I've learned is this is a better way to do things—a faster, better and effective way. You have to have a goal and objectives. When you work through the process we've been learning at NICHQ, everything is very efficient.
Prior to the working with NICHQ, we had had some broad areas of focus for our plan for the year, but really had no strategy or mechanism for testing whether a change that we implemented was an improvement. And we’d always implement statewide before knowing if the change was beneficial. I’ve seen other participants in NICHQ projects make a similar shift and now think about how things are possible instead of impossible.
