Boston Children's Hospital And CareDox To Develop A New Pediatric Care Model To Better Manage The Rise In Pediatric Chronic Disease
Partnership First Aimed at Helping K-12 Schools Address Growing Chronic Behavioral Health Conditions Among Children
NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CareDox, the nation's largest provider of healthcare software and services for K-12 school districts, today announced a partnership with Boston Children's Hospital to address existing gaps in pediatric disease management. Rates of chronic disease now affect 15 to 18 percent of children and teens, and those estimates may not fully account for growing obesity and mental health woes. Together, CareDox and Boston Children's will tackle the rise in chronic conditions among children by working through a part of the healthcare system that is not well addressed – K-12 schools, starting with mental health screenings.
"Large gaps exist in the current model of pediatric care, and the rapid rise of asthma, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and diabetes has outstripped our ability as a country and a system of care to help children and their families manage these challenging conditions," said Hesky Kutscher, CEO of CareDox. "Working with schools, payers and, starting today, some of the nation's leading experts in clinical care for children, CareDox will play a leading role in addressing the unmet needs of our nation's youth."
K-12 students spend an average of 14 percent of their waking hours in school by the time they are 18 years old, where school nurses play a critical role in managing an increasing number of complex chronic medical conditions. Working with clinical experts at Boston Children's Hospital, CareDox is jointly developing new tech-enabled care management services to assist nurses and children's primary care providers to more effectively manage these conditions together. These care management solutions will be based on CareDox's digital records management platform, which is now in use at 7,100 schools supporting more than 4.9 million students.
Boston Children's Hospital will advise CareDox on the development of new tech-enabled services via its Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator group.
"Together, we are addressing gaps in access to quality pediatric care that is so desperately needed in thousands of communities and for millions of families across the country," said John Brownstein, Chief Technology Officer at Boston Children's. "Our two organizations are creating a new model of care delivery – one that combines Boston Children's expertise and pediatric clinics protocols with the nation's largest health platform for K-12 school districts – to bring care management directly to where 50 million children spend a significant portion of their daily lives."
The Mental Health of our Nation's Youth: Addressing an Unmet Need
Nowhere is the gap in pediatric care more acute than behavioral health, where one in five youth experience some form of mental illness, but less than 20 percent of those diagnosed receive treatment. Working with experts in child behavioral health at Boston Children's Hospital Department of Psychiatry, CareDox will first develop methods for school-based screening of children for ADHD, depression, PTSD and other mental health conditions.
CareDox: Growing to Meet the Healthcare Needs of Children Nationwide
Today, CareDox's trained nurses visit individual schools and administer wellness services, and thousands of school nurses interact with CareDox's technology platform daily to digitally manage instances of care throughout the year. In fact, the CareDox technology platform replaces schools' historical use of paper records. By allowing school nurses, administrators and parents to digitally manage a student's care online, it significantly reduces time spent managing a student's healthcare.
And with the increase in chronic conditions among school-aged children – conditions like asthma and diabetes – it's critical to capture details of visits to the school nurse and maintain complete and timely tracking of chronic illness. CareDox's platform is helping school nurses manage 380,000 chronic conditions among 270,000 students. Further, there are more than 50,000 care management plans maintained in the CareDox system.
The CareDox platform and training for school nurses and health professionals are both provided free of charge to schools. And schools and individual students and their families are not charged any fee for CareDox's services, as each vaccination or wellness exam is reimbursed by a student's individual health plan. CareDox maintains 61 individual contracts with payers across eight states. If a service isn't covered for any reason, CareDox absorbs the cost.
For more information on CareDox, please visit www.caredox.com.
About CareDox
CareDox is the leader in pediatric healthcare technology and services aimed at transforming the most consistent health delivery system in the U.S.; K-12 public schools. The company's health records management technology houses more than 4.9 million student health records, and its unique, no-cost wellness services, including in-school flu vaccinations, are in operations in more than 7100 schools. The company was founded in 2014 and is based in New York City. To learn more about CareDox and how they work with schools and payers, please visit www.caredox.com.
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