Portfolio Sponsor Spotlight: Children's National Health System

Monday, March 12, 2018

“This project demonstrates not just that we can develop great QI collaboratives with community-wide stakeholders, but also that we can align the work with the ABP requirements for practitioners to get MOC credit,”

— Dr. Mark Weissman, Chief, Division of General Pediatrics and Community Health

In our nation’s capital, DC Medicaid requires that participating primary care providers offer annual behavioral and mental health screenings for all Medicaid-enrolled children. Despite these mandates, most pediatricians in the District of Columbia were not routinely screening for behavioral or mental health issues at annual well-child visits.Tamara John Li, MPH, Project Lead-MOC, Dr. Mark Weissman,  Chief, Division of General Pediatrics and Community Health, and  Dr. Lee Beers, MD, Medical Director of Municipal and Regional Affairs, all at Children’s National Health System

To improve treatment and outcomes for children, the Children’s National Health System worked with key partners — the American Academy of Pediatrics DC Chapter, the DC Partnership to Improve Children’s Healthcare Quality, and other District organizations — to create the DC Collaborative for Mental Health in Pediatric Primary Care. The learning collaborative aims to help participating pediatricians improve their identification, referral, and management of childhood behavioral and mental health problems during annual well visits.

The District of Columbia has seen notable improvements in screening rates for behavioral and mental health in the two years since the project launched, says Children’s National’s Dr. Weissman.

“The DC Collaborative is also trying to move into the space of improving the referral system between the primary care practices, early childhood mental health services, and early education providers so there’s more of a closed-looped process for kids who screen positive or need some extra services.”

Pediatricians who participate meaningfully in the mental health collaborative can earn Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Part 4 points for their participation because Children’s National Health System is a Pediatric Portfolio Sponsor with the ABP.

“This project demonstrates not just that we can develop great QI collaboratives with community-wide stakeholders, but also that we can align the work with the ABP requirements for practitioners to get MOC credit,” says Dr. Weissman.

“We’ve been doing this quality improvement approach long enough that the framework is pretty well recognized across our community and region. People come up with ideas, and they now come to us. They identify areas where they can make improvements and use some of the tools that we’ve given them to do the work. They come back a year later and say, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this work without anybody prompting us to do it. And it made our lives so much better.’”

Learn more about ABP Portfolio Sponsor Organizations.

Children's National

This story was first published in the ABP's 2017 Annual Report.

2017 Annual Report (PDF)

Was this page helpful?
* Please do not use this space to ask questions that require a response. Instead, please use the CONTACT tab on the right.