Despite excellent intentions and pockets of superb care, a major opportunity exists to improve care for children and their families, as much care is still delivered in ways that are not consistent with the evidence. The proposed project partners the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ),an organization for children's healthcare improvement with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a medical specialty society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics (ABP), a certifying body. Together with advice and assistance from other national organizations and individuals working to improve care for children, they will use their coordinated efforts and resources to support large-scale activities that have been shown to be effective in improving care for children. Efforts will initially be applied to improving care for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Affecting 4-12% of school-aged children, ADHD is the most common neurobehavioral disorder of childhood. In the first project year, the partnership will develop a strategy to support improvements at the local level. Building on NICHQ's success improving care for children with ADHD, this partnership will engage about five state AAP chapters in systems- and evidence-based collaborative learning sessions along with an interactive web-based CME quality improvement tool (eQUIPP). ABP will collaborate by including eQUIPP as a vehicle for satisfaction of new certification requirements. Efforts in subsequent years will focus on supporting these local improvement networks, spreading these efforts to additional AAP chapters, and beginning work with pediatric residency training programs. During the planning and project years, the partnership will join forces with a national family-based organization, Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (CHADD), to ensure an appropriate child and family focus to improvement efforts. This application addresses the priority funding area of mental health care for children, and builds directly on findings resulting from a number of prior AHRQ-sponsored efforts to translate research into practice. It also addresses the Healthy People 2010 objective of increasing the proportion of children with mental health problems who receive treatment.
| Lazorick, Suzanne; Crowe, Virginia L H; Dolins, Judith C et al. (2008) Structured intervention utilizing state professional societies to foster quality improvement in practice. J Contin Educ Health Prof 28:131-9 |
