Improving Health Outcomes for Children (IHOC)

Over 100 participants attended the Improving Immunizations Learning Session on Friday, February 10th at the Augusta Civic Center including members of practice teams, parent partners and other community organizations. This was the first Learning Session held in conjunction with the Medical Home Pilot Practices and Community Care Teams! You can retrieve all of the slides and documents from the Learning Session on the Tools and Resources tab on this site (see column on left).

Congratulations to the many practice teams who received incentives for meeting or exceeding the First STEPS immunization targets for September, October, and November of 2011.

In January, the First STEPS Leadership Team distributed incentives to practices and staff that achieved documented improvement in immunization process and outcome measures during the first three months of Phase I of the First STEPS collaborative. The incentives are intended for use in honoring the practice staff for their hard work in meeting or exceeding in the various measurement areas.

The First STEPS team would like to thank the statewide MaineHealth Childhood Immunization Task Force for providing a grant to Maine Quality Counts to use to provide these incentives to practices to support their work to improve immunization rates during Phase 1 of the First STEPS collaborative.

To find out more about the incentives and who received the incentives

Consistent delivery of child health preventive services is an essential first step to building a healthy future for Maine. At the same time, there is strong evidence that there are barriers preventing children enrolled in Maine’s Medicaid program (MaineCare) from receiving adequate levels of evidence-based preventive services. To help address these significant gaps in care, Quality Counts on behalf of the Improving Outcome for Children (IHOC) Program and MaineCare is introducing the “First STEPS (Strengthening Together Early Preventive Services) Learning Initiative,” a comprehensive effort to provide outreach, education, and quality improvement support to primary care practices to improve rates of Early, Periodic,  Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) services. In direct alignment with the Maine Patient Centered Medical Home’s work to transform practice and to provide care that is “accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective,” First STEPS offers an exciting and promising approach to improve preventive services for children in Maine.