Children Now
1404 Franklin Street, Suite 700
Oakland, CA
United States
Children Now is a long time partner of CareQuest Institute and is a lead child policy advocacy organization working across California.
Historically funding has supported network-building and policy advocacy related to expanding coverage and access to care in California Medicaid, as well as expanding the scope and practice of the broader oral health workforce in the state. Additionally, Children Now played a lead role in implementing a local dental pilot project testing medical-dental integration as a part of the state’s last 1115 waiver.
Through the medical-dental integration pilot, Children Now partnered with Oral Health Solutions to design and pilot MDRAN as tool to support effective, data-driven care coordination that encompassed factors related to the social determinants of health. To date, Children Now has had such success in implementing MDRAN in Sacramento County that they have expanded to various sites such as physician’s offices, school-based screening programs, and other community-based programs.
A few unique factors of MDRAN are that it not only captures data related to referrals given and referrals that are successful, but it also supports data related to additional support services such as translation or transportation. The success of this is built on a strong relationship with Medi-Cal that ports claims data into MDRAN and refreshes every 30 days.
To date, MDRAN has been implemented only in a managed care environment. With this proposal, Children Now is seeking to implement the program in partnership with the local health jurisdiction and hired oral health care coordinators in San Joaquin County, which operates on a fee-for-service (FFS) system. San Joaquin is home to a myriad of inequities and disparities including:
•64% of school-aged children qualify for free or reduced lunch
•41% of the county’s population are eligible for Medi-Cal
•As a part of the Central Valley region of California, they are in a historically divested area compared to neighboring regions and home to an overrepresentation of people of color.
By implementing in FFS environment, MDRAN users will be able to see things such as whether Medi-Cal members have used dental benefits in the last 12 months, alerts when referrals are made and when they land, and care coordinators will be able to document supports provided, the number of contacts made to Medi-Cal members, and the outcomes of those contacts.
The budget for this proposal is $105,001. A third of is allocated toward staff time, with the remainder allocated for staff travel and supplies. About half of it will go to the partnership with Oral Health Solutions, who will play a complimentary role in building the online functionality for a FFS environment and getting the technical aspects off the ground.
The total budget for Children Now is $9,103,650, and so this grant represents about 1% of their total budget.