PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia will receive a $247,000 grant from The
Commonwealth Fund to support research to test a new method of identifying
children at risk for developmental delays and to recommend new programs for
preventive care.
The study, called "Tailoring Pediatric Preventive Care to Individual
Needs, Phase 2: Validating a New Instrument" will be a part of the Fund's
program on Child Development and Preventive Care. Researchers at Children's
Hospital will test whether a series of questions helps pediatricians
identify children at risk for developmental delays. The researchers plan to
use their results to help design service packages to meet the specific
needs of children at different risk levels.
"Those children with more challenging problems could benefit from more
frequent visits to their doctor, but we don't yet know how to identify
those children," said project director Susmita Pati, M.D., M.P.H. "Right
now it is a one-size-fits-all approach to pediatric primary care and there
is no program for differential insurance reimbursement."
This study may help families with greater needs gain access to more
frequent and longer visits with their pediatrician, more help on parenting,
frequent interaction with the support staff, and home visits by a nurse or
case worker, Pati said.
An earlier Commonwealth Fund project entitled "Tiered Health
Supervision," developed the brief set of about a dozen questions to allow
doctors to obtain information on individual children and prescribe targeted
preventive services. With this second grant, Children's Hospital
researchers plan to test the effectiveness of that questionnaire for 2,100
children up to age three. The resulting risk scores will be compared
against results of developmental screening and health care utilization data
collected by a separate Centers for Disease Control study.
Other Children's Hospital researchers in the project include
co-investigators Christopher Forrest, M.D., Ph.D., and James Guevara, M.D.,
M.P.H; and statistician Russell Localio, Ph.D. Forrest helped develop the
questionnaire, which includes predictors such as sociodemographics, birth
weight, family environment, child care and receipt of health care.
"The importance of this study is very practical: We know early school
failure is related to developmental delays," Pati explains. "We picked out
10 to 15 items that will have reasonable predictive accuracy to how
children perform in school by age seven. We want to identify those children
who can benefit from more services as early as possible."
Dr. Pati currently is a pediatrician and health services researcher who
examines the impact of policy on health care access for underserved
children and families. She is an attending general pediatrician at
Children's Hospital and Senior Fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute of
Health Economics and Associate Scholar at the Center for Clinical
Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her prior
work focused on the impact of welfare reform on underserved populations and
trends in public spending on social welfare programs. Presently, she is
funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to
identify predictors of Medicaid retention among underserved children and
families and to examine the impact of maternal health literacy on
participation in child social welfare programs.
The Commonwealth Fund, among the first private foundations started by a
woman philanthropist -- Anna M. Harkness -- was established in 1918 with
the broad charge to enhance the common good. The mission of The
Commonwealth Fund is to promote a high performing health care system that
achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency,
particularly for society's most vulnerable, including low-income people,
the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.
The Fund carries out this mandate by supporting independent research on
health care issues and making grants to improve health care practice and
policy. An international program in health policy is designed to stimulate
innovative policies and practices in the United States and other
industrialized countries.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the
nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to
providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric
healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives,
Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited
children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in
the country, ranking third in National Institutes of Health funding. In
addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have
brought the 430-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children
and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
CONTACT: Juliann Walsh
Media Relations Specialist
Phone (267) 426-6054
Walshj1@email.chop.edu
SOURCE The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
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Related links:
http://www.chop.edu
CONTACT:
Juliann Walsh, Media Relations Specialist,
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, +1-267-426-6054,
Walshj1@email.chop.edu
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