Helping Children and Families Reach Their Full Potential

Cincinnati Children’s is leading the way in improving child health. Unfortunately, not all children have the same opportunity to achieve optimal outcomes related to their health and well-being due to factors such as racism, poverty, neighborhood violence and others. Health outcomes are intertwined with factors outside the hospital walls. These include differences in access to nutritious food, healthy housing, safe neighborhoods, educational support and more.

The Michael Fisher Child Health Equity Center is committed to collaborating within Cincinnati Children’s and across the community. Our goal is to identify and address the underlying causes of these inequities so that all children are able to live their best lives.

The Fisher Center was named in honor of former Cincinnati Children’s CEO Michael Fisher for his unwavering dedication to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion across Cincinnati’s healthcare landscape. His leadership has had a lasting impact, ensuring that all of Cincinnati’s children have equitable access to the care and opportunities they deserve.

At the Fisher Center, we are anchored in the vision that all children and families should reach their full potential. Our mission is to:

• Amplify child, youth and family leadership
• Co-create conditions in the health system and the community that will foster excellent and equitable outcomes
• Promote equity and challenge injustice

Five core principles guide the way we work:

1. Focus on children, youth and families
2. Accept collective responsibility for results that matter
3. Pursue racial and social justice
4. Be strengths-based and action-oriented
5. Foster belonging, trustworthiness and generosity

Our Outcomes

The Fisher Center was created to explore, address and eliminate inequities in child health and well-being. We focus on improving outcomes in three key areas, all centered on closing equity gaps in our community and beyond.

Excellent and Equitable Health Outcomes

The Fisher Center is working to reduce avoidable hospitalizations to give children more days at home and school, with a focus on closing equity gaps.

Path to Full Potential

We are pursuing equitable pathways to full potential by improving academic and developmental outcomes for all children, with a focus on closing equity gaps.

Safe and Supported Families

We are expanding a system for community learning that includes shared objectives, capabilities, data and sustained partnerships. These efforts address social influences on health and close equity gaps—with particular focus on the vital conditions for thriving. These conditions include basic needs, safety, humane housing, economic mobility, meaningful work, belonging and civic muscle. Cincinnati Children’s is a leader in improving the health and lives of kids.

Partnerships

Partnering With Communities

The Fisher Center partners with community members and organizations to create conditions that promote equitable child and family well-being outcomes. We facilitate these partnerships through the All Children Thrive community-based learning network. This network is an innovative, city-wide collaborative among families, community members, social agencies, educators, public health agencies and healthcare providers. Our shared goal is to create conditions so all children can thrive.

The Fisher Center works across local governments, businesses and other organizations on multisector collaborations to improve health equity for children. Examples of this community-engaged work include:

• SAFE: A network of individuals and organizations committed to improving food security in Cincinnati. This system works to ensure that all children have the food that they need to grow, develop, learn and thrive. The SAFE Network includes organizations focused on food access, healthcare systems, schools and government institutions. These groups also collaborate with data scientists, neighborhood leaders and families in the Cincinnati area.
• School Partnerships: We work with schools to use innovative partnerships, shared learning, and an improvement mindset to ensure that students can reach their full academic potential.
• Citywide capability building: We are committed to engaging with leaders in our community to build capabilities that drive equity. For example, we are leveraging improvement science as one key shared method toward community collaboration. Over the past 10 years we have trained more than 400 partners, from 45 community organizations, in improvement science methodology – creating an operational framework for shared work on behalf of children and families.

Our work supports children and families by:

• Building community capabilities in learning systems, improvement science, data analysis, community organizing and co-creation to amplify child, youth and family leadership, agency and voice
• Partnering to improve educational access, food access and other community conditions that promote equitable well-being outcomes
• Convening organizations and community members—including executive leaders—to build multisector partnerships that measurably impact equitable health and well-being outcomes
• Advancing community learning, research and system change in ways that promote equity and challenge injustice
• Cultivating city and regional co-leadership around vision, strategies and outcomes—with an infrastructure that will support shared learning

Partnering Within Cincinnati Children's

Our vision is to make Cincinnati’s children the healthiest in the nation. Within Cincinnati Children’s, we partner with our clinical teams to support excellent and equitable health outcomes for our patients. From now through Fiscal Year 2028, we are focused on reducing avoidable hospital stays so children have more days at home and at school.

With a focus on closing equity gaps, we are working across our system to pursue equity in our data, policies, processes and clinical practices. We know that health outcomes are deeply influenced by what happens outside the walls of the institution. To that end, we focus on building effective community-clinical partnerships that will allow us to collaborate with community partners to address the needs of our patients and families.

Health Equity Network (HEN)

HEN, an initiative of the All Children Thrive (ACT) Learning Network, is supported by the Michael Fisher Child Health Equity Center and the Office of Population Health. HEN currently encompasses 17 multidisciplinary teams from clinical areas throughout Cincinnati Children’s, with plans to continue expanding.

Asthma Learning Health System (ALHS)

ALHS is an organizational intervention designed to integrate asthma-related clinical care, community-based support and research. The work spans across the translational spectrum, achieving excellent and equitable asthma outcomes for children and adolescents in Cincinnati and beyond.

Asthma prevalence and morbidity are both far higher in Cincinnati than the national average. We can and must do better. Through ALHS, we seek to equitably reduce asthma attacks and promote asthma control.

Pathways to Integrated Psychosocial Care

The Pathways to Integrated Psychosocial Care initiative aims to promote equitable, positive health outcomes through effective identification and response to social challenges such as depression, suicide risk and substance use. Through the work of our cross-institutional teams, we are learning the most impactful ways to identify and address social needs in partnership with community organizations. We aim to scale screening and response pathways while keeping children and families at the center of the process.

Contact Us

To partner with the Fisher Center or to learn more about our work, please contact us at FisherEquityCenter@cchmc.org.