State at a Glance: Georgia
Georgia is featured in the following reports from the National Evaluation:
- Evaluation Highlight No. 6: How are CHIPRA quality demonstration States working together to improve the quality of health care for children?
- Evaluation Highlight No. 7: How are CHIPRA quality demonstration States designing and implementing caregiver peer support programs?
- Implementation Guide No. 1: Engaging Stakeholders to Improve the Quality of Children’s Health Care
- Implementation Guide 2: Designing Care Management Entities for Youth with Complex Behavioral Health Needs
Learn more about Georgia’s CHIPRA quality demonstration projects on this page:
Overview
Georgia is working with Maryland (one of the 10 grantees) and Wyoming in an innovative multi-State learning collaborative, led by the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS), to implement a comprehensive provider-based model of service delivery for youth with serious behavioral health challenges. The three States represent diverse geographic areas and Medicaid structures and a range of experience in using the model, known as a care management entity (CME).
Georgia's Objectives
As one of the States in this tri-State partnership, Georgia is working to expand an existing CME to improve the quality and cost of care for Medicaid and CHIP children with serious behavioral health challenges. Georgia aims to improve: 1) access to home and community-based services; 2) clinical and functional outcomes; 3) cost outcomes; and 4) family and youth resiliency for children and youth with serious behavioral health needs.
Assessing a Provider-Based Model of Care
CMEs utilize the wraparound practice approach, which includes the following activities: a youth-guided, family-driven, individualized, and strengths-based service planning approach that is coordinated across agencies and providers; intensive care coordination; peer support; and home- and community-based services as alternatives to costly residential and hospital care. In 2011, the three partner States implemented the necessary project planning tool developed by CHCS to quantifiably measure their collaborative-wide goals and determine which data are available to monitor progress.
Specifically, Georgia is:
- Expanding the population of children and youth served by CMEs.
- Evaluating and refining the State's current CME model.
- Evaluating and refining the CME financing model and rate structure.
- Establishing a continuous quality improvement framework for CMEs.
- Developing a network of credentialed family and youth Peer Support Specialists.
Testing an Approach to Quality Improvement of Georgia's Own Design
Using resources available through the CHIPRA grant award, Georgia is developing and implementing a statewide network of certified parent and youth Peer Support Specialists. The project is intended to enhance the behavioral health workforce to include skilled and trained peer specialists in each region of the State who will be easily accessible to families and youth throughout the system. A total of 150 parent/youth peer specialists will be targeted for training and certification over the course of the grant. Some workforce attrition is expected, resulting in a pool of 120 certified parent and youth peer specialists engaged in the workforce by the end of the grant. The demonstration evaluation will incorporate information such as cost analyses, cost allocation, the number of trained specialists employed, the utilization of specialists across child-serving agencies, and the impact on policy change and development at the administrative level.
Evaluation Questions
The national evaluation team will gather information from Georgia to address a wide range of questions about the implementation and outcomes of their efforts including:
- How did the multi-State learning collaborative enhance Georgia's efforts to expand the CME model and achieve its other goals?
- To what extent did Georgia's efforts to expand the CME model improve quality of care for youth with serious behavioral health challenges?
- Did the CME model reduce overall behavioral health service costs for the children and youth who are enrolled in the CME?
- What are the key lessons from Georgia's experience that would be useful for other States?
Learn More
This information is current as of February 2014, slightly more than 4 years after the grant award. To learn more about the projects that Georgia is implementing under the CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grant Program, please contact:
Laura P. Lucas, MS
CHIPRA Project Director
Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD)
2 Peachtree Street, NW
Atlanta, GA 30303
23-272
404-463-0979
lalucas@hr.state.ga.us
To learn more about the CHIPRA CME Quality Improvement Collaborative, visit www.chcs.org/info-url_nocat3961/info-url_nocat_show.htm?doc_id=1250388 or contact Dayana Simons at dsimons@chcs.org.
