The Tri-state Children's Health Improvement Consortium (T-CHIC) is an alliance between the Medicaid/CHIP programs of Alaska, Oregon, and West Virginia formed with the goal of markedly improving children's health care quality. In February 2010, the Oregon-led consortium was awarded nearly $11.3 million over a 5 year period by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grants. Through this opportunity, the T-CHIC is using a variety of strategies to demonstrate the impact that different ways of delivering health care and health care information can have on a child's health. This project aims to drive continuous quality improvement in child health care by:
Improving children's health and health care quality measurement
Integrating Health Information Technology (HIT) systems
Developing the best models of health care delivery for children and their families
Alaska is working with three practice sites to implement a medical home model suited to the state's rural and frontier nature. The state will also work with the sites to collect, report, and test the use of an initial core set of children's quality measures, improve care coordination, and improve HIT infrastructure by encouraging use of electronic health records (EHRs) and linking providers to the support and resources of the State's health information exchange (HIE).
