Cost of Care Coordination for Children With Special Health Care Needs Vol. With Special Health Care Needs Initial experiences in managed care have demonstrated that disease management approaches that incorporate targeted case management and quality management in addition to physician training and outreach can significantly improve quality and reduce the costs of care for certain populations with chronic illness.
Some programs address children with chronic illness.
For example, Greineder et al 1 demonstrated that selected high-risk children with asthma who were enrolled in an outreach program operated by the Harvard Community Health Plan, Boston, Mass, achieved reduced rates of hospitalization, reduced rates of emergency department utilization, and improved quality of care. We are interested in the utility of case management and disease management for more heterogeneous populations enrolled in mandatory state Medicaid managed care programs. However, we have not been able to demonstrate a net cost savings as the costs of the program are roughly equal to savings resulting from decreased use of inpatient resources. The authors describe a collaboration between the Children's Hospital at Strong in Rochester, NY, and a regional insurance company. There were several important findings in the study.