Fellowship Spotlight: Improving Maternal & Infant Health Outcomes in Michigan
The Maternal Infant Health Unit within MDHHS has knowledgeable and experienced staff who have administered the MIHP program for a combined 45 years and have an additional 30 years in MIHP experience outside of the Department. Their expertise allows them to be more than capable of making the changes described below. However, administration of a statewide program impacting more than 30,000 individuals with a small team of 7 staff means limited capacity to focus on an overall realignment of program documents and regulatory processes.
By placing a Fellow within this unit, MDHHS was able to focus on issues related to compliance, administrative burden, process and content streamlining, and equity. The Fellow expanded MDHHS' capacity to comprehensively overhaul program requirements, such as facilitating a collaborative process to review every component of the program, recreating program documents and supporting tools, and providing technical assistance based on best practices. Additionally, the Fellow provided a neutral external perspective which supported consensus building among both the staff and the providers throughout the process. Outcomes include creating a supportive process for agencies by reducing administrative burden, implementing an objective and equitable process for measuring compliance with program standards with use of streamlined documentation and a virtual review format, and creating a continuous quality assurance plan for monitoring outcomes and making recommendations for the future of the program.
Key findings
At the time of this report, the updated program documents and compliance monitoring system have been implemented for six months and 28 certification reviews have been completed. The Fellow developed internal processes for tracking certification review outcomes disaggregated by reviewer and indicator. The average review score is 87% compliance and there is no significant difference found between reviewers at this time. MDHHS will continue to review the data for compliance trends which may allow for both targeted and broad quality assurance support.
