Major Strides in Well Child 3-6

Major Strides in Well Child 3-6

February 21st, 2020 | Clinical Connections

Assessing physical, emotional and social development is important at every stage of life, but particularly for young children. Regular well visits for young children facilitate the delivery of needed developmental and other interventions, ensuring that children enter school ready to learn and reach their full potential. In addition to the benefit to patients, focusing on improvement in Well Child 3-6 visits contributes to both quality metric and cost performance under AHP’s value-based contracts, since these visits can help reduce unnecessary utilization and the over cost of care.

When the Optimization team selected Well Child 3-6 for a quality improvement project, the network’s 2018 performance was the lowest among all pediatric preventive health measures (excluding adolescents). Providers told us that barriers to closing these gaps were many and included transportation, scheduling, and lack of parental understanding of these visits’ importance. With these challenges in mind, AHP developed a toolkit containing a parental education strategy and best practice workflows for pre-visit planning, no-shows and call-backs.  Prioritizing the 33 practices that were struggling with the measure, members of the Optimization Team met individually with each practice to share the toolkit, discuss new workflow implementation and set goals for measure improvement.  These efforts paid off dramatically: after implementation, the network’s performance went from the 50^th percentile to the 90^th percentile in 2019.

With sustainable improvement for Well-Child 3-6 established, it’s important to ensure that children are receiving the interventions required when screenings uncover a need.  To that end, AHP has partnered with GROW-Rochester, an initiative underway at the Children’s Institute focused on providing comprehensive screenings for Medicaid-eligible three-year olds complemented by facilitated, closed loop referral to services.  Providers can expect to hear more in the coming year about the GROW partnership and AHP’s efforts to ensure that our community’s children receive comprehensive screenings, preventive care and needed services.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact AHP’s Associate Medical Director for Pediatrics, Laura Jean Shipley, MD