Rapid Cycle Quality Improvement (RCQI) Approaches for Developing the Capacity of Community-Based Organizations to Address COVID-19 and Cancer Disparities in Latinx Communities

In Massachusetts, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx communities resulting in higher infection rates as well as increased unemployment, loss of health insurance, and interruptions in medical care such as cancer screenings and appointments.

Latinx-serving community-based organizations (CBO’s) in the cities of Boston and Worcester have been on the front lines responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating access to healthcare, COVID testing, and vaccinations for underserved Latinx.

The aim of this pilot project is to understand how Rapid Cycle Quality Improvement (RCQI) approaches can be used with Latinx-serving Community-Based Organizations (CBO’s) in order to build their capacity to address the negative impacts that COVID-19 has had on Latinx communities’ ability to access cancer prevention, screening, and care. RCQI is an emerging technique to design and monitor health system interventions frequently used in health care, academic, and community-based settings (Leatherman et al., 2010). Researchers will partner with Latinx-serving CBO’s and their stakeholders to use RCQI methods for analyzing the data CBO’s have collected during the COVID-19 pandemic with special attention to cancer care interruptions. By using RCQI approaches CBO’s can strengthen their organizational capacity to help multilingual and multicultural populations that are disproportionately at risk for COVID infection and more likely to experience cancer disparities.

Principal Investigators:

Lorna Rivera, Ph.D, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Jarvis T. Chen, Sc.D., Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center

Jaime Vallejos, MD, MPH, Worcester State University