ICC Hits NYC!

Members of the IMPLICIT network presented a poster about Interconception Care (ICC) last month at the annual North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) meeting in New York.  The energy and excitement of this inter-professional, international conference provided a great opportunity to showcase preliminary ICC data.  Our poster shared exciting results from nearly 2,700 unique babies being followed with our innovative model of using WCVs to screen mothers.

We generated a lot of traffic and interest in the project from a range of health professionals with different backgrounds.  From medical students to residency faculty to community health workers to practicing physicians, providers were eager to learn more about the rationale and feasibility of implementing ICC in their settings.  Many researchers gave positive feedback, validating the work that the network is doing in this arena.  Some words used to describe the work were “intuitive” and “brilliant”.   As we continue to disseminate ICC across primary care disciplines, we know others will agree wholeheartedly!

FMEC IMPLICIT Network Overview

The Family Medicine Education Consortium (FMEC) IMPLICIT Network is celebrating its 10^th year of sustained collaboration.  There are now nine residencies in the network who have implemented Interconception Care (ICC) of mothers as part of our care provided during well baby and well child care visits up to 2 years of age.  We need a forum where we can share the successes and challenges of implementing this care model.  My question for today is how will we know from a population health basis that this model of ICC is improving quality of life and health care outcomes for women and their families?  Before we implemented this model, we did a baseline survey of mothers during their well child care visits of their one and two year olds.  At this time, we could replicate this study to see if mothers in participating practices have experienced a change in the frequency of ICC they have received from their family doctors during the previous year.  We can then compare this data with the baseline study.  What other outcomes could we study?