Health Care Innovation Awards Round Two: Wisconsin Department of Health Services Project Profile

Project Title: "Special Needs Program for Children with Medical Complexity"
Geographic Reach: Wisconsin
Estimated Funding Amount: $9,457,875

Summary:

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services project will test an intervention that aims to enhance and expand the Special Needs Program (SNP) model that is currently in place at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin (CHW). The model establishes a dedicated care team consisting of physicians, nurse practitioners, nurse care coordinators, lay navigators, and other ancillary staff as necessary to work specifically with those children with some of the highest ongoing medical needs. The care team works with the children through every step of the process, coordinating care across specialists, educating the family on care transitions and how to best care for children in the home, and communicating care plans with local primary care physicians. The intervention has been in place in a more limited format at CHW for over a decade, and has proven results of reducing inpatient hospital costs by more than 50%. This proposal also expands the SNP to an ambulatory setting, allowing for identification of high-needs children who may not be at an inpatient hospital need of care, but still have high medical complexity. A third arm of this proposal is that the SNP model (intensive inpatient focus) will be expanding to a second tertiary pediatric center in Wisconsin to test scalability of the intervention.

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