Abstract
This brief highlights the major strategies, lessons learned, and outcomes from Maine’s experience from February 2010 to February 2016 with the quality demonstration funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) through the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA).
Maine’s Goals: Improve the quality of care for children by 1) increasing state-level reporting and use of child-focused quality measures 2) helping practices implement quality improvement projects 3) developing a secure electronic method for primary care providers to access health information for children in foster care
Insights Results
Overview of model
Maine expanded State-level reporting and use of child-focused quality measures, increasing quality measure reporting by 11 measures during the demonstration period
Engaging stakeholders in the identification of quality measures to be tracked and topics to be addressed in learning collaboratives helped Maine improve consistency in measure reporting and encouraged practices to participate in quality improvement (QI) activities
Maine increased the use of preventative services by enhancing the system for real-time reporting on immunization measures, encouraging the use of pediatric focused quality measures to monitor practice performance, and hosting learning collaboratives (e.g., collaborative subjects included immunizations, developmental screenings, oral health and healthy weight)
Practices that participated in the developmental screening learning collaborative increased rates of developmental and autism screening at a faster pace than did other practices in the State
Maine developed a process to securely upload health information for foster care children so that it can be retrieved by Maine’s Health Information Exchange (HIE)
Key takeaways/implications
Partnerships: Maine and Vermont implemented similar projects and met regularly to discuss shared lessons
Challenges: efforts to report quality measures and share health information through HIE was limited by incomplete administrative data, complexities related to sharing behavioral health information, variations in connectivity and child health providers’ use of the HIE
