Improving Child Health in RI - July 2022 PCMH Kids Stakeholder Meeting

  • 11 Jul 2022

The July quarterly PCMH Kids Stakeholder meeting, led by Drs Beth Lange and Pat Flanagan, held space for participants to reflect on accomplishments, hear about past and continuing work, and discuss future priorities.

PCMH Kids convened in 2013 with a mission and vision to engage stakeholders in developing high-quality, family and patient-centered medical homes so that RI’s children and youth could grow up healthy and reach their optimal potential.

Since then, PCMH Kids has engaged 36 practices covering 105,000 lives and representing more than 80% of the state’s pediatric Medicaid population to transform care to become team-based, data-driven, high-quality, value-based, family-centered medical homes leading to National Committee of Quality Assurance (NCQA) Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) recognition.

Practices have gained knowledge, shared best practices, and improved in areas of:

  • Childhood Developmental Screenings
  • BMI Screening and Counseling
  • ADHD Screening, diagnosis, and treatment
  • Maternal Post-partum Depression Screening
  • Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) in adolescents
  • Resiliency and perseverance through COVID-19 pandemic
  • Well-Child and Well-Adolescent Care Visits through the Cares Act Pediatric Relief Fund
  • Telehealth

PCMH Kids continues to work with practices and providers to identify needs and areas for additional support. Quality improvement initiatives that are in progress continue to strengthen families, expand the care team, and focus on behavioral health (BH). Upcoming projects include new models of community learning, workforce development and health equity. All of which have the goal of improving patient care as well as improving job satisfaction for those that care for patients.

As PCMH Kids looks towards the future, we see changes to the RI State Budget for FY23 beneficial to RI’s children, opportunities for new practice payment models, further integration of BH into primary care practices, increased coordination with community-based organizations, and so many more encouraging changes.

Special thank you to the funders, PCMH Kids founders, participating practices and providers, and practice facilitators. A full list of organizations and names is available in the meeting presentation.

To see the data and learn more about past, current, and future initiatives, learning collaboratives, or projects click here to access the meeting recording or here for the presentation.

For questions or comments, please reach out to Carolyn Karner at ckarner@ctc-ri.org.