About Us

What is the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative?

The Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative (LaPQC) is a network of perinatal care providers, public health professionals, and patient and community advocates using quality improvement methods to improve outcomes, and change the culture of care in Louisiana so that every family experiences a safe, patient-centered, and dignified birth. The Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative is an initiative of the Bureau of Family Health under the authority of the Louisiana Commission on Perinatal Care and Prevention of Infant Mortality (Perinatal Commission).

Local and national public health data, along with advisement from health system partners and advocates inside and outside of Louisiana, guides the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative priorities and actions. Through high-touch collaborative learning, improvement science coaching, and data use for improvement, the Collaborative helps healthcare facilities implement changes centered on four areas: reliable clinical processes, respectful patient partnership, effective peer teamwork, and engaged perinatal leadership.

Areas of Change

Reliable Clinical Processes

• Assure readiness
• Improve recognition and prevention
• Understand and reduce variation in response

Respectful Patient Partnership

• Design for patient partnership
• Invest in improvement that benefits all patients

Effective Peer Teamwork

• Reduce variation in reporting
• Change the work environment
• Improve workflow

Engaged Leadership

• Manage for quality and systems learning
• Enhance patient and family relationships
• Change the work environment

The Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative also provides designations through two programs: the Louisiana Birth Ready Designation and the Louisiana Gift Designation. These designation programs exist to recognize participating birthing hospitals for their success in quality improvement work with implementing evidence-based best practices for maternal and neonatal care, while also rewarding sustained improvement.

The Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative maintains an advisory committee composed of health systems, public health officials, representatives from the state Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC), community partners, managed care organizations (MCOs), and representatives from policy and advocacy organizations.

Based on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement, the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative has also created a “faculty” of cross-disciplinary experts, including community organizations, families, and patients, to support continuous quality improvement efforts.

All Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative initiatives and work are grounded in the principles of patient-centered care. The Institute of Medicine defines patient-centered care as “providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patients’ values guide all clinical decisions” and identifies patient-centered care as one of the six domains of healthcare quality. To meet designation requirements, birthing hospitals must demonstrate consistent quality improvement efforts to ensure patient-centered care.

To learn more about the six domains of healthcare quality, visit the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Our History

The Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative was built on statewide quality improvement work that began in 2006 with The Gift quality initiative and designation program. The next statewide initiative was the Louisiana Department of Health’s 39-Week Initiative that concluded in 2012. The initiative was a voluntary program in which hospitals agreed to establish policies to end the practice of elective, non-medically necessary deliveries before 39 weeks of gestation. This was followed by the Louisiana Hospital Engagement Network (LaHEN) hypertension initiative that ended in 2016.

In 2017, the Louisiana Department of Health, Office of Public Health, Bureau of Family Health, worked with the Perinatal Commission and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to build capacity and lay the groundwork for the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative. The Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative launched its first formal initiative in 2018, with the launch of the Reducing Maternal Morbidity Initiative (RMMI), an initiative focused on addressing preventable maternal mortality, morbidity related to hemorrhage and hypertension, and reducing racial disparities in these maternal outcomes. The same year, The Gift was integrated into the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative. Now, the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative supports several initiatives in multiple healthcare settings aimed at improving maternal and neonatal outcomes throughout Louisiana.

Over the years since its inception, the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative has successfully advanced the use of quality improvement science in birthing facilities across the state through small-scale pilot initiatives, intensive statewide initiatives, and quality designation systems.

To learn more about our history, see the 2023 Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative Report.