The Partners for Kids pediatric Accountable Care Organization — serving some 300,000 Medicaid-eligible kids in Ohio, reduced costs over five-year study period ending in 2013. Yet, improvements in quality were merely modest, says Kelly Kelleher, M.D., lead author of the study recently published in Pediatrics. ”Other organizations hoping to replicate some of the success of a program like Partners for Kids may have trouble doing so unless they forge regional partnerships,” reports Hospital & Health Networks.
“We had really good partnerships with the state Medicaid office and the managed care plans in doing this,” Kelleher, who is also vice president of community health services at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, told H&HN “People without those relationships are going to struggle to do this because the margins are a lot narrower with children.”
