Cincinnati Children’s Child Policy Research Center Collaborates to Improve Quality of Care in CHIP, Medicaid

Project Aims to Find Effective Strategies to Improve Children’s Health Care

Monday, October 04, 2010

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has awarded a five-year, $8.25 million contract to Mathematica Policy Research and its research partners, The Urban Institute and The Cincinnati Children’s Child Policy Research Center, to evaluate the outcomes of $20 million in quality improvement grants awarded earlier this year.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded $20 million in first-year grants to 10 states under a five-year, $100 million effort to improve health care quality and delivery systems for children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This Quality Demonstration Grant Program is intended to help establish a national quality system for health care provided to children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.

The goal of the new $8.25 million contract is to provide information on how to replicate successful programs to improve children’s health care quality, enhance families’ access to information, and promote consumer choice. The research team will work with grantees to gather qualitative and quantitative information on the outcomes of states’ efforts to use new measures of children’s care quality, and to demonstrate the impact of a model electronic medical health record.

“This is the single most important federal investment to directly improve the quality of children’s health care on a broad, sustainable basis,” said Lisa Simpson, MD, MPH, Director, Child Policy Research Center and project director at Cincinnati Children’s. “We are expecting to learn which strategies work best under which conditions so that we can spread these lessons to even more states,” she said.

About Cincinnati Children’s

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center is one of just eight children’s hospitals named to the Honor Roll in U.S. News and World Report’s 2010-11 Best Children’s Hospitals. It is ranked #1 for digestive disorders and highly ranked for its expertise in pulmonology, cancer, neonatology, heart and heart surgery, neurology and neurosurgery, diabetes and endocrinology, orthopedics, kidney disorders and urology. Cincinnati Children’s is one of the top two recipients of pediatric research grants from the National Institutes of Health. It is internationally recognized for quality and transformation work by Leapfrog, The Joint Commission, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and by hospitals and health organizations it works with globally. Additional information can be found at www.cincinnatichildrens.org.