Left behind again: Rural home health services in a Medicaid pediatric accountable care organization.

PURPOSE: To contrast trends in rural and urban pediatric home health care use among Medicaid enrollees. METHODS: Medicaid administrative claims data were used to assess differences in home health care use for child members in a large pediatric accountable care organization (ACO) in Ohio. Descriptive statistics assessed rural and urban differences in health care use over a 10-year period between 2010 and 2019. FINDINGS: Pediatric home health care use increased markedly in the low-income (CFC) and disabled (ABD) Medicaid categories. Over the past 10 years, CFC-enrolled children from urban communities have seen more home health visits, fewer emergency department (ED) visits, and more well child visits compared to rural CFC-enrolled children. Children enrolled due to disabilities in urban communities have also seen more home health visit use but fewer preventive care visits than their rural counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: Within a pediatric ACO, rural home health care use has remained relatively stagnant over a 10-year period, a stark contrast to increases in home health care use among comparable urban populations. There are likely multiple explanations for these differences, including overuse in urban communities, lack of access in rural communities, and changes to home health reimbursement. More can be done to improve rural home health access. Such improvement will likely necessitate large-scale changes to home health care delivery, workforce, and financing. Improvements should be evaluated for return-on-investment not only in terms of direct costs, that is, reduced inpatient or ED costs, but also in terms of patient and family quality-of-life or key indicators of child well-being such as educational attainment.

Pediatric Hospitalists' Lessons Learned From an Innovation Award to Improve Care for Children With Medical Complexity.

Children with medical complexity experience frequent hospitalizations and pose a unique challenge for the pediatric hospitalist and their healthcare team. Pediatric hospitalists are ideally positioned to champion improved care coordination for CMC and to address the areas of need in clinical practice, quality improvement and research. Lessons learned from programs who were Healthcare Innovation Award recipients from Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation that were aimed at improving care for this population are presented. We focused on care coordination activities implemented during hospitalization. Through a series of meetings with the participating programs, we identified common themes across awarded programs. Programs described key aspects of care coordination during the hospital stay, beginning on admission (multidisciplinary team goal setting, family partnership and action planning), through hospitalization (integrating outpatient and inpatient care), as well as during and after discharge (linking to community-based systems and supports, expanding the transition concept). Finally, we present actionable steps for inpatient providers seeking to improve care for this patient population at the time of hospitalization.