Seattle Children's Network Turns Data Trust Into Preventive Care Gains, With Lessons for Security Teams

When a child misses a well-visit or a vaccine window closes, the consequences rarely show up right away. They show up years later, in a delayed diagnosis or a preventable illness. That lag is part of why preventive care is so hard to improve at scale. The gains are real, but they're slow and invisible, which makes it easy for busy practices to deprioritize the work that matters most.

Seattle Children's Care Network decided to make that invisible work visible, and it did so in an unusual way: a six-week, bracket-style competition modeled on March Madness. The results were notable on their own terms. Across three targeted measures, scheduling future well-child visits, HPV vaccination, and developmental and autism screening, participating practices achieved a combined 10.6% improvement over their own baselines.

But the more interesting story here isn't the leaderboard. It's what had to happen before anyone could trust the numbers on it.

Seattle Children's Care Network isn't a single hospital system. It's a clinically integrated network made up of Seattle Children's hospital, Children's University Medical Group, and 17 independently operated pediatric primary care practices spread across eight counties in Washington State. Independent practices mean independent technology choices. Dr. Kenisha Campbell, chief medical officer at Seattle Children's, put the scale of that fragmentation plainly: the network was working across more than 20 different electronic health record instances, each paired with its own payer relationships, workflows, staffing models and reporting capabilities.

Think of it like trying to run a relay race where every runner uses a different stopwatch, calibrated differently, and some of them are a few minutes fast or slow. You can't fairly judge anyone's speed until every watch is set to the same time. That's essentially what Campbell's team had to solve before they could ask 17 practices to compete, or even collaborate, around shared goals.

Building a Foundation Practices Could Trust

The network turned to Arcadia, a population health data and analytics platform, to aggregate and standardize clinical and claims data from those more than 20 EHR environments and multiple payer sources into one consistent measurement system. That's the unglamorous infrastructure work that rarely makes headlines, but without it, nothing downstream would have held together.

"Before we could ask practices to compete or collaborate around shared goals, we needed confidence that everyone was looking at the same numbers, calculated the same way and updated on a schedule fast enough to matter," Campbell said. That data infrastructure, she added, was the foundation the rest of the initiative depended on.

Before the competition launched, technical and operational teams worked with the vendor to validate data completeness and confirm the logic behind how each measure was calculated. In one case, they even accelerated data integration for a practice that wanted to join before the competition began. Given how many source systems were feeding into the project, Campbell said, that validation work wasn't optional. It was essential.

Once the foundation was in place, the structure itself became the engine for engagement. The six-week initiative, launched in late February 2026, was split into three two-week sprints, each tied to a specific preventive care priority. Practices were matched into head-to-head brackets based on size, payer mix and baseline performance, and advancement depended on improvement relative to each practice's own starting point rather than an absolute ranking. That design choice mattered: it meant a small practice with modest resources could compete fairly against a larger one, because both were only racing against their past selves.

A parallel engagement track awarded points for quality improvement activities, staff education and best-practice adoption, giving practices that were eliminated early from the bracket a reason to stay involved. Biweekly quality scorecards and weekly engagement leaderboards went out to practice leaders, providers and operational teams throughout the network. Because those numbers were being watched closely, analytics and quality teams set up daily monitoring routines to check data feeds, flag missing files and investigate anomalies, with expedited escalation when something looked off. Protecting confidence in the data, Campbell noted, was just as important as the improvement numbers themselves.

The results broke down by sprint. The first, targeting scheduling of future well-child visits, saw one practice improve roughly 64% relative to its own baseline, with two others close behind at approximately 61% and 48%. The second sprint, nicknamed "Cancer Conquerors," focused on HPV vaccination among eligible 9- to 12-year-olds and produced an 18% to 19% increase in vaccination performance, a result Campbell called particularly meaningful given that childhood immunization rates have been declining nationally and vaccine hesitancy remains a persistent barrier for many families. The third sprint, "Screening Superstars," targeted developmental and autism screening following the American Academy of Pediatrics' Bright Futures Guidelines, and produced about a 15% improvement, driven mainly by workflow standardization and better documentation.

That last point deserves emphasis. Developmental and autism screening is a leading indicator for early intervention, but if the screening isn't documented properly, it doesn't count in quality reporting or value-based care contracts, even if the care itself was delivered. Trusted, near-real-time data let practice teams catch documentation gaps within the two-week sprint window, rather than discovering them months later in a retrospective report, by which point the opportunity to course-correct had already passed.

Why It Matters

Healthcare networks are increasingly stitched together from independent pieces, hospitals, affiliated practices, community clinics, each running different systems and reporting on different timelines. That fragmentation isn't just an efficiency problem. It's a trust problem, and trust problems undermine everything from quality improvement to patient safety to cybersecurity posture, since fragmented systems with inconsistent data governance are also harder to monitor and secure.

Seattle Children's experience suggests a useful order of operations: validate the data first, then build the incentive structure on top of it. Skip the validation step, and even the most creative engagement strategy will produce numbers nobody trusts enough to act on. Get it right, and you create something durable, a shared, verified view of performance that outlasts the competition itself and gives every practice, regardless of size or resources, a fair shot at improvement.