by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | June 12, 2014
From the June 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
There are also staff — child life specialists — that are trained to not only help the child, but their siblings to get through the illness and to explain what they’re doing and why. Another big issue, because you’re dealing with the family, is making sure there’s compliance with medication routines and things like that. So it’s depending on someone else in the house to understand the importance of medication compliance and keeping appointments.
While we do have some really large children’s hospitals, the fact is thankfully, that most kids are well. So where you might have four or five adult heart surgery centers in town, you might only have one in a whole state for kids, because there’s just not the market. Caring for children with medical complexity requires more partnerships among children’s hospitals to versus having one do everything.
HCBN: Does reimbursement differ for children’s hospitals?
AK: For the children’s hospital industry on average, 55 percent of the patient population relies on Medicaid. Medicaid reimbursement is determined at the state level. To begin to address this, our legislative work is focused on children with complex issues and creating designed networks to care for them. They may need four or five different pediatric specialists, so the goal is to create a national designation of children’s networks so that reimbursement isn’t a barrier, and we’re looking to do it in a more efficient way.
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