This issue brief provides an overview of the telehealth response to COVID-19, outlines temporary state policy flexibilities that improved access to pediatric telehealth services, and highlights opportunities for permanent state policy expansions to maintain access to pediatric telehealth services within Medicaid now that the COVID-19 public health emergency has ended.
This issue brief reviews the importance of continuity of coverage for all children now that the COVID-19 public health emergency has ended, and highlights state opportunities to improve eligibility and enrollment policies and procedures.
The unwinding of the COVID-19 public health emergency means states must redetermine eligibility for millions of children and families. Partnering with community-based organizations, family-led organizations, and individuals with lived experience to engage their communities can help support efforts to ensure continuity of coverage. This issue brief provides recommendations for states work with these organizations to mitigate coverage loss.
This opinion piece from Oregon Pediatric Improvement Partnership (OPIP) highlights a model of health complexity they developed and offers recommendations for how to strategically use data to begin eliminating health disparities.
Family involvement in the education of clinicians has the potential to improve patient-clinician partnerships in care. Meaningful partnership between families and clinicians requires intentional planning and a shared understanding of goals. This article describes one example, the seminar series Collaborative Conversations with Families to Advance the Clinical Care of Children with Medical Complexities (C6), a continuing medical education endeavor jointly designed and implemented by families and clinicians.
The value of incorporating families’ lived experience in systems-level activities is well understood by health care providers and policymakers. However, little detail exists in the literature about what information and supports are needed to assist families and professionals throughout the process of engaging with families. In this article, researchers present a framework for family engagement grouped into four action-oriented domains: commitment, transparency, representation, and impact. Adoption of this framework by child-serving entities will support a sustainable, equitable, and meaningful process in which families can contribute to policy development and improvement.
Pediatric home health care is in crisis. Children with medical complexity require a substantial amount of medical care and activities-of-daily-living support to live at home. However, due to a shrinking pool of available home health care workers and narrow state eligibility requirements for services, most of their care is increasingly delivered by families without pay. In response, the option to pay family caregivers for their children’s medical labor is gaining national traction. This webinar provided a brief overview of laws that govern care for this population and specific models of paid family caregiving, and how they have been recently expanded in several states. Speakers explored a policy solution to pay families to provide home health care to their children with medical complexity and disabilities.
When access to assessment and routine care by a pediatric specialist is delayed, patients may receive inappropriate or insufficient treatment, experience complications, and have potentially avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. This report outlines the findings of a survey of the members of the Children’s Specialty Care Coalition and provides a snapshot in time of access to pediatric subspecialty care in California.
When access to assessment and routine care by a pediatric specialist is delayed, patients may receive inappropriate or insufficient treatment, experience complications, and have potentially avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. This fact sheet describes the current population of children with medical complexity in California and summarizes the status of access to care from pediatric subspecialists compared to data collected in 2019.
Transition from pediatric to adult health care is a critical component of care for youth and young adults, especially those with chronic conditions, but few families receive guidance on this process from providers. This article provides a comprehensive framework for health care transition, which identifies gaps and proposes measures to help improve this process. Additional attention must be paid to measuring the quality of transition to stimulate practice improvement and ensure accountability.
