State at a Glance: West Virginia
West Virginia 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. 6: How are CHIPRA quality demonstration States working together to improve the quality of health care for children?
- Evaluation Highlight No. 9: How are CHIPRA quality demonstration States supporting the use of care coordinators?
- Evaluation Highlight No. 13: How did CHIPRA quality demonstration States employ learning collaboratives to improve children’s health care quality?
- Article: Nine States’ Use of Collaboratives to Improve Children’s Health Care Quality in Medicaid and CHIP
Learn more about West Virginia’s CHIPRA quality demonstration projects on this page:
Overview
West Virginia is working with Oregon (one of the 10 grantees) and Alaska in a tri-State partnership to implement projects in three of the five grant categories:
- Showing how a core set of children's quality measures can be used to improve quality of care for children.
- 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.
West Virginia's Objectives
In West Virginia, a large proportion of the child population lives in rural areas and with low-income families. West Virginia is working with 10 practice sites in a virtual learning collaborative to implement a medical home model. West Virginia will also work with these practice sites to (1) collect, report, and test the use of the initial core set of children's quality measures and (2) encourage the use of an electronic personal health record for meaningful use in medical homes focused on improving the health of the population.
Working with the Initial Core Set of Children's Quality Measures
West Virginia will collect, report, and test a subset of the initial core set of children's quality measures while identifying measurement gaps and areas for improvement. The Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), a national initiative out of the Oregon Health Sciences University, will develop a West Virginia–specific quality profile using existing population-based measures that highlight the need for quality improvement based on data from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children's Health and the 2009–2010 National Survey of Children with Special Healthcare Needs.
Using Health IT to Improve Child Health Care Quality
West Virginia will use a Web-based reporting system to collect data from participating practices. It will encourage meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) and personal health records (PHRs) and will modify the PHR developed by the West Virginia Health Improvement Institute to include the initial core set of children's quality measures and care coordination templates. West Virginia will provide coaching and technical assistance in quality improvement approaches, the medical home model of care delivery, making practice changes, quality measurement, and using existing EHRs to achieve medical home recognition.
Assessing Provider-Based Models of Care
West Virginia will use the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) medical home definition to guide activities under this category. Using a virtual learning collaborative approach involving 10 practices over 18 months, West Virginia will help practices understand the medical home concept and implement quality improvement processes. The State will provide participating practices with a full-time care coordinator who will work with them to identify practice-specific aims to be achieved over a 3-year period.
Evaluation Questions
The national evaluation team will gather information from West Virginia to address a wide range of questions about the implementation and outcomes of its efforts, including:
- How did West Virginia use the tri-State partnership to implement best practices in quality measurement and health IT applications?
- What strategies were used to connect providers to access to a personal health record that can be used with their existing EHR?
- To what extent did West Virginia's medical home model succeed in improving the quality of health care for children?
- What are the key lessons from West Virginia's experience that would be useful for other rural 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 being implemented in West Virginia under the CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grant Program, please contact:
Oliver Droppers, CHIPRA Project Director
Office for Oregon Health Policy and Research
1225 Ferry St SE Salem, OR 97301
503-507-2990
Oliver.Droppers@state.or.us
