State at a Glance: Vermont
Vermont is featured in the following reports from the National Evaluation:
- Evaluation Highlight No. 2: How are States and evaluators measuring medical homeness in the CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grant Program?
- Evaluation Highlight No. 4: How the CHIPRA quality demonstration elevated children on State health policy agendas
- Evaluation Highlight No. 6: How are CHIPRA quality demonstration States working together to improve the quality of health care for children?
Learn more about Vermont’s CHIPRA quality demonstration projects on this page:
Overview
Vermont is working with Maine, one of the 10 grantees, in a two-State partnership to implement projects in three of the five grant categories:
- Promoting the use of health information technology (IT) to enhance service quality and care coordination.
- Implementing a more comprehensive provider-based model of service delivery.
- Testing an approach to quality improvement of a State's own design.
Vermont's Objectives
Using Health IT to Improve Child Health Care Quality
Vermont's health IT initiatives are tightly integrated with, and designed to support, its provider-based model improvement project. The State's goal is to improve the collection and use of child health quality information by expanding the Vermont Blueprint for Health IT infrastructure to support guideline-based care, performance measurement, population management, and coordination with community-based services for the child population. The demonstration involves expanding the State's Web-based, central clinical registry to include visit planners that summarize all needed services for a given patient used by the physician at the point of care and reflect the current care guidelines for preventive services.
Assessing a Provider-Based Model of Care
Vermont is extending the Blueprint for Health advanced primary care practice model and evaluating its impact in child-serving primary care practices. As of December, 2013, 28 pediatric and four family practices have undergone the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Patient-centered Medical Home (PCMH) assessments. To support the practices and their involvement in Blueprint activities and quality improvement efforts, Vermont has assigned practice facilitators to (1) assist practices in obtaining NCQA recognition; (2) facilitate conversations among providers, Blueprint leaders, and community health teams in order to identify and address needs in the child population; (3) support adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and connectivity to the central registry; and (4) identify topics for ongoing quality improvement. These facilitators are now fully supported by the Blueprint for Health, which has allowed Vermont, in the final year of the grant, to conduct an additional project on care coordination in primary care practices.
Testing an Approach to Quality Improvement of Vermont's Own Design
Vermont aims to support 20 States, including Maine, in development of a sustainable State Improvement Partnership (IP) and to evaluate the IP model as a replicable, sustainable vehicle to effect measureable improvements in the quality of children's health care. The proposed IP model and national network of IP States, the National Improvement Partnership Network (NIPN), are designed to support within and cross-State collaboration, respectively; accelerate translation of evidence-based strategies to children's health care delivery; and provide an innovative approach to test, share, and learn about strategies to reduce redundancies and costs in the Medicaid program while improving the quality of health care for children nationally.
Evaluation Questions
- How did Vermont expand its State data infrastructure to incorporate more data on children?
- To what extent did Vermont's efforts to build on its existing Blueprint succeed in improving the quality of health care for children?
- What are the key lessons from Vermont's experience that would be useful for other States?
Additional Resources
Vermont provided the following reports and other resources:
This article in an Academic Pediatrics supplement describes the work of the National Improvement Partnership Network, which is helping 20 States develop sustainable State-level improvement partnerships working to improve child health care quality.
Note: These reports have been submitted by the CHIPRA Quality Demonstration States and are made available on this Web site as a courtesy. The description of any product, policy, program, or other resource on this Web site does not imply an endorsement by AHRQ, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or any other Government agency.
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 being implemented in Vermont under the CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grant Program, please contact:
Garry Schaedel
Vermont CHIPRA Project Manager
University of Vermont, College of Medicine
Vermont Child Health Improvement Program
UHC St. Joseph 7206B
1 South Prospect Street
Burlington, Vermont 05401
802-656-9195-Office Phone
802-656-4545-Fax
Garry.Schaedel@med.uvm.edu
