Foundations of Equity Learning Collaborative - Evaluation Report

The Learning Collaborative (LC) is a short-term learning system that brings together peers from multiple organizations to seek improvement in a focused topic area, with guidance from a coach or practice facilitator. This approach is based on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)’s Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement.

At the 2020 Alliance for Healthier Communities’ (Alliance) annual general meeting, Alliance member organizations made a commitment to achieving a 75% completion rate for sociodemographic (SD) data by 2024. To support this commitment to equity, the Alliance planned and implemented its second learning collaborative (LC). The purpose of this collaborative was to:

• Increase organizations’ ability to pursue equity by increasing the completeness and usefulness of SD data.
• Increase knowledge of quality improvement (QI) methods and tools and increase the capability to do QI.
• Support the development of and transition of the community health sector to a learning health system.

This learning collaborative ran from May 2022 to April 2023 with 27 teams participating and included three learning sessions, two sharing sessions, a capstone event, and a lot of work in between.

Evaluation was embedded throughout the collaborative to answer two overarching questions: 

1. Did participating organizations see an improvement in their SD data?
2. Did the LC increase knowledge of QI methods and tools and increase the capability to do QI?

This report relays a summary of key evaluation findings, key strategies teams implemented to improve data collection rates, as well as recommendations shared by participating teams in order to improve ongoing and future LCs.