G-2106-17049

NC Child is North Carolina’s state child advocacy organization that advances strategies and policies to ensure all children grow up in a state that truly invests in their potential. NC Child’s work focuses on quality early childhood education, health, nurturing homes and communities, and family economic security. NC Child is the states’ KIDS COUNT partner and therefore plays a central role in North Carolina in terms of using data to drive policy and decision-making.

Included in this is a new report published in September of 2021 called Tooth Dismay: A New Look at the Data on Children’s Oral Health in NC which represents newly available data from NC DHHS about children & pregnant adults enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program and uncovers the increased barriers to oral health care faced by people of color and people in rural parts of the state.

The core focus of the proposed slate of work is to partner with a variety of statewide networks of community-based organizations, the North Carolina Oral Health Collaborative, and NC Child’s Parent Advisory Council (PAC) on the creation of a community-driven definition of value and quality within oral health. The PAC represents a group of Medicaid beneficiaries and parents or caregivers of Medicaid beneficiaries that NC Child has been building trusted relationships with over the past two years as one mechanism to ensure those closest to the problems trying to solve are informing their work. The implementation of this project includes:

The collection and analysis of Medicaid beneficiary stories from around the state will identify trends and policy solutions.

The development and dissemination of a “family voices” report sharing first-person stories of challenges and failures that families on Medicaid have experienced.

Partnering with beneficiaries in systems-level discussions to advance efforts to include oral health into NC’s newly launched Medicaid managed care system.

There is a unique opportunity for this proposal, given the CareQuest Institute’s future plans to implement COrHT in North Carolina, in partnership with the NC Oral Health Collaborative. NC Child, and its previous iterations as an organization, has been one of the state’s key players in Medicaid policy for decades. Having NC Child as a partner and leader supporting deep community engagement and policy work operate along-side of the implementation of COrHT offers an opportunity to think about how CareQuest Institute holistically support states in advancing how care is delivered and compensated. As well, there are capacities that can be built in CareQuest Institute’s future plans for the COrHT initiative.

The budget for this proposal is $125,000 which primarily supports time and travel associated with the deliverables as well as funds to support the PAC. This budget amount represents about 6% of the total organizational budget.