Local Health Department, County

Lorain County Public Health (LCPH) used QI to improve the efficiency of its prenatal/newborn home visiting performance management system, with the result of freeing time that nurses could devote to providing the service, while also improving the quality and utility of the information provided.

Implementing an improved process to collect customer feedback resulted in a staggering increase in customer satisfaction survey responses, from an average of 12 per month to more than 1,000 per month. The feedback will greatly enhance Manatee County Health Department’s (DOH-Manatee’s) performance...

Tarrant County Public Health’s (TCPH’s) North Texas Regional Laboratory (NTRL) decreased the cost of a specific HIV test by 40% by testing and adopting an alternative control test method. NTRL has received level funding for a few years while laboratory expenses have continued to grow. Achieving...

By using the Six Sigma DMAIC method, Lake County Health Department streamlined their billing process for the Dental Program. This change resulted in a significant decrease in lost revenue, from an average of $5,354 per quarter down to an average of $2,076. The quarterly losses decreased steadily...

Clackamas County Public Health Division has improved its onboarding processes to ensure that occupational health requirements are met within 30 days after hiring new employees and annually thereafter to ensure that risk is low and that employees and clients are safe and healthy.

Client complaints and staff dissatisfaction with prenatal clinic wait times led the Seminole County DOH to use QI to decrease their client visit times. Focusing on modifying the prenatal scheduling matrix, eliminating duplicate charts, and decreasing the physical distance traveled between check-...

This health department was able to achieve a 51% improvement in HIV testing rates, which can result in identifying more people with HIV and better, more immediate treatment. In order to reduce redundancy, the QI project team eliminated one of the demographic forms that had been required, saving...

Cabarrus Health Alliance and partners used quality improvement to streamline their processes for referrals for pregnancy care management to improve overall handoffs and cycle times, resulting in more timely and effective referrals for care management to ensure healthier mothers and babies.

Washington County (OR) conducted a Kaizen Event to improve the volume of childcare facilities that used the LHD for their state required inspections. The agency implemented several new policies and protocols to standardize the entire inspection process. As a result, they anticipate a reduction in...

Home visiting programs are an important intervention to improve the health of women and children, but they are generally done in programmatic silos. A state health department used QI to improve the process and systematically address both chronic disease and environmental health risk factors...

This state health department quality improvement (QI) effort sought to improve customer satisfaction and increase use of the Utah state laboratory. The intervention tested was the development of a website for use by local health department (LHD) staff, who achieved both of the QI project goals. In...

Vaccinating children is imperative in the prevention and spread of life-threatening communicable diseases. A rural regional health district conducted an improvement project using PDSA at three public health clinic sites to increase immunization rates among 19–35-month-old children seen at their...

Increasing participation in public health programs is a goal of many agencies. In this QI project, the Kenosha County Division of Health sought to expand and enhance its prenatal care coordination (PNCC) and reproductive health services. QI resulted in changes in the process with the addition of a...

Due to a variety of barriers, including inefficient flow of clients during WIC visits, eligible families were not engaging with WIC services. The clinics at this health department improved their processes and exceeded their initial goals, allowing many more families to be able to eat well and be...

A local health department noted a high rate of early post-partum unintended pregnancies among women in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, and used QI to identify three interventions to reduce the rate.

Using QI, Skagit County improved their implementation of the Coordinated Approach to Child Health (CATCH) Kids Club Program as a strategy for addressing childhood obesity in their community, which resulted in a 71% increase in physical activity among the program participants.

A quality improvement mini-collaborative in North Carolina focused on developing a workforce development plan to increase public health nurse retention. After doing root cause analysis, the team developed a nurse-mentoring program and measured results after six months.

Access to prenatal care contributes to successful birth outcomes. A Kansas health department found that patients had challenges completing the application process for the Medicaid Children’s Health Insurance Program. By conducting patient education and assistance with the application, the health...

This six-county health district department used QI to achieve a 75% increase in response to satisfaction surveys by customers of their environmental health services.

Committed to minimizing the health and social impact of pandemic influenza in its jurisdiction, this health department applied continuous quality improvement (CQI) tools and methods to improve the accuracy, effectiveness, and timeliness of its risk communications plan and messages to staff and...

An urban local health department found that 35% of mid-level staff did not know who to contact for questions about new department programs and services. This workforce development QI project led to development of a common resource packet that enabled staff to respond more quickly and effectively...