AOK Networks Developmental Pathway

The AOK Networks Developmental Pathway provides a comprehensive vision for early childhood success in AOK Network communities. Organized around the three child impacts found in the AOK Networks Conceptual Framework, it illustrates many of the most important child and family outcomes related to each impact area. The purpose of the Developmental Pathway is three-fold.

It provides a comprehensive vision for early childhood success. It includes not only the outcomes for how the child impacts will be measured, it also provides critical early success outcomes for children and their families. This framework is a reminder of the interrelated nature of all the outcomes affecting children’s health, safety, and development. And as an early childhood system, it enables partners from across sectors to see how their efforts fit within a holistic vision for children and their families.

It informs AOK Networks’ assessment and planning process. Specific indicators related to the outcomes in the Pathway provide the basis for the community assessment and planning process. The Pathway provides a common structure to analyze data by domains, e.g., health, safety, which makes it easier to develop a targeted problem for the child and family outcome initiative. The targeted problem is a set of related child and family outcomes (related to one of the child impact areas) the AOK Network aims to improve. The system assessment identifies the system issues that must be addressed in order to improve the outcomes in the targeted problem.

It creates a common statewide framework while honoring local individuality. Finally, having a shared framework for defining targeted problems across the state makes it easier to tell a statewide story for each child impact area while honoring the specific details of each local effort. Several AOK Networks may be focusing on Healthy Births, but each AOK Network may be addressing very different issues. For example, one may be focusing on substance use during pregnancy while another is focused on prenatal care.