Maternal and Child Health Research Consortium - Children in the US continue to encounter barriers to healthcare and consequently suffer from poor health outcomes. Among industrialized countries, the U.S. consistently ranks among the worst for health outcomes. Arkansas is among the five states with poorest overall health among children and adolescents. Nearly one in four children in the state has not visited a healthcare professional in the past year. In 2022, approximately 9.3% of children born in Arkansas were classified as low-birth weight, and nearly 40% of children between the ages of 10 and 17 years were overweight or obese. Responding to Category 2 of the Maternal and Child Health Research Consortium, we aim to improve childhood preventive care, develop strategic partnerships with healthcare providers and educators, and strengthen family collaborative care models. We will build new partnerships and leverage existing ones with school-based health clinics and community health centers to facilitate access to well-child care and reduce nonurgent emergency healthcare use. Initially, we will implement interventions to improve management of childhood asthma and address obesity. The overall goal of this project is to build a research consortium that directly improves the health of children in Arkansas and elevate those findings to be generalizable to be adapted nationally. We have three aims to accomplish this goal: (1) Build the Consortium for Advancement of Research and Evidence-Based Models for Kids (CARE-Kids) infrastructure to strengthen the evidence base for effective interventions, services, and systems for pediatric care, creating three cores to support the infrastructure: Administrative, Research and Analytics, and Implementation and Community Engagement, guided by an Advisory Committee, and establishing a Research Design, Analytic, and Survey Hub to provide methodological support and technical assistance to researchers, trainees, and the larger communities; (2) Conduct research studies that examine pediatric outcomes, where we plan to apply various study design and methodology to understand barriers to optimal pediatric preventive care and identify interventions that achieve quality of care and improvement in process and intermediate health outcomes, as well as including trainees on these project to enhance their research skillset; and (3) Develop and maintain a national, regional, and local interdisciplinary network of partners that guides the mission and work of CARE-Kids and disseminates study findings to fit the needs of the communities, via a dissemination and implementation plan and translating findings into best practices and information, adapted and refined for different target audiences. Our initial three research projects will (1) identify low-performing providers on a comprehensive list of pediatric quality of care metrics using large claims dataset; (2) assess the impact of school-based health centers on the use of emergency care for asthma-related incidence in communities with and without readily available access to pediatric primary care; and (3) use partner-engaged implementation and improvement science methods to develop and implement a bundle of pediatric evidence-based interventions in rural community health centers to close gaps in performance on service/quality measures (well-child visits, preventable ED visits) and health outcomes (BMI). We will leverage our location in Arkansas, where much improvement in both access to care and health outcomes is needed. We will begin our work in this state and apply lessons learned to wider audiences and disseminate through our local, regional, and national networks. Establishing a research infrastructure and strategic partnerships to support this work is critical to ensure that continuous efforts to grow this evidence base in a high-need area can be sustained once dissemination and implementation of the best practices derived from our studies occurs across various institutions and communities.
