Abstract: The Institute for Child Health Policy at the University of Florida (UF-ICHP) currently measures and evaluates quality of care for almost 1 in 5 children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in the US. We collaborate with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), the Florida Healthy Kids Program which oversees CHIP, two Texas Medicaid Managed Care Plans and their health system partners, two dental plans, the OneFlorida Clinical Data Research Network, and two External Quality Review Organization (EQRO) partners. The collaborators joined to form the Child Health Quality (CHeQ) Partnership. We also partner with PEDSnet, a national network of children’s hospitals and providers, who will participate in validation for measure refinements that incorporate electronic health record (EHR) data. Through our collaboration experiences, we identified implementation and dissemination opportunities for two Pediatric Quality Measurement Program-Centers of Excellence (PQMP-COE) measure sets: 1) Linkage Between Dental Treatment and Dental Prevention and 2) Safe and Judicious Antipsychotic Use in Children and Adolescents.

The two goals of this project are to test the feasibility and usability of the selected PQMP-COE measure sets through: 1) field testing; refining; collecting data, including testing the efficient collection of valuable clinical data from EHRs; and reporting on the measures; and 2) translating the results into QI goals and multi-level performance improvement projects (PIPs). The proposed project has the following four specific aims to improve the quality of care children receive and thereby meet the two goals.

Aim 1. Establish measure set feasibility through field testing, evaluating, refining, and reporting results.

Aim 2. Establish measure usability in collaboration with the CHeQ partners by translating the Dental and Antipsychotic measure set results into QI goals while identifying primary and secondary drivers at multiple levels (e.g., state, managed care plan, provider) to achieve the goals.

Aim 3. Design projects aimed at performance improvement for Dental and Antipsychotic quality of care.

Aim 4. Implement and disseminate leading-edge methods to evaluate quality of care at multiple levels and to compare performance improvement at each level.