Mental Health in the Medical Home: A Longitudinal Curriculum for Pediatric Residents on Behavioral and Mental Health Care.

Introduction: Currently, a pediatric mental and behavioral health crisis exists, driven by increasing stressors among children coupled with a paucity of psychiatric providers who treat children. Pediatric primary care providers can play a critical role in filling this gap, yet trainees feel uncomfortable screening for, identifying, and managing mental and behavioral health conditions among their patients. Thus, expanding training for pediatricians in this domain is critical.

A Quality Improvement Approach to Improving Discharge Documentation.

Introduction: Accurate discharge documentation is critical to ensuring a safe and effective transition of care following hospitalization, yet many discharge summaries do not meet consensus standards for content. A local needs assessment demonstrated gaps in documentation of 3 essential elements: discharge diagnosis, discharge medications, and follow-up appointments. This study aimed to increase the completion of three discharge elements from a baseline of 45% by 20 percentage points over 16 months for patients discharged from the general pediatrics service.

Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Quality Improvement Principles: A New York City Pediatric Primary Care Experience.

Unlabelled: In the setting of COVID-19, pediatric primary care in New York City faced multiple challenges, requiring large-scale practice reorganization. We used quality improvement principles to implement changes to care delivery rapidly.

Methods: Plan-do-study-act cycles were used, based on primary drivers of consolidation, reorganization of in-person and urgent care, telehealth expansion, patient outreach, mental health linkages, team communication, and safety.

Integrating Nurse Care Managers in the Medical Home of Children with Special Health Care needs to Improve their Care Coordination and Impact Health Care Utilization.

Purpose: There is a rising number of children with special health care needs (CSHCN) in the pediatric medical home and their care coordination is complicated and challenging. We aimed to integrate nurse care managers to coordinate care for such patients, and then evaluate, if this improved health care utilization.

Design And Methods: This quality improvement project evaluated the impact on CSHCN of the integration of nurse care managers in the pediatric medical home.