In late 2014, President Obama announced immigration executive actions that include a new program providing temporary work authorization and protection fromdeportation for certain undocumented parents with US citizen or lawful permanent resident children. This executive action buildson similar steps the President took in 2012, which created a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that has already provided work authorization and protections to thousands of people living in the US who were brought here as children. The President’s recent executive actions are currently on hold, awaiting a court decision. However, in addition to granting a reprieve from the fear of deportation, these new immigration policies would also provide a unique opportunity in California for some of these families to gain Medi-Cal coverage, thus enrolling a large share of the remaining and hard-to-reach uninsured parents and children in the state. The Children’s Partnership and Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families released a new report outlining how to prepare for these potential new coverage opportunities in California.
Download the Action List : How Can Your Organization Help Get DAPA and DACA Families Covered?
Download the Map: Where DAPA Eligible Parents Live in Southern California
Download the Flyer: Are you DACAmented? People with DACA Status Are Eligible for Health Coverage
Find more resources for undocumented families at ALL IN For Health
Telehealth—the use of technology to provide and coordinate health care at a distance—has proven to be an effective tool in making specialized care more accessible for children with special health care needs (CSHCN), but in California providers and families are not using this service to its full potential. A new report explores the benefits of and barriers to using telehealth and provides recommendations to integrate telehealth into California’s health care delivery system for CSHCN. The report is coauthored by The Children’s Partnership, the UC Davis Children’s Hospital, and the Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP), with support from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health.
ALL IN For Health launched with a simple mission: equip schools and early learning centers with the tools they need to get more kids and families enrolled in health coverage. This model has proven to be highly successful—with our partners who are leaders in education and early learning, ALL IN For Health delivered more than 6.5 million messages across the state informing families about health coverage and encouraging them to take action to get covered. In the past couple of years, we’ve learned some valuable lessons about what works in conducting a statewide campaign that partners health advocates and the education community in order to benefit the children and families they both serve. Find out more in ALL IN’s Highlights and Lessons Learned: 2013–2015 and download the infographic.
Invaluable lessons can be gleaned from the real-world experiences of foster youth, families, and care providers who rely on the current inadequate record systems and paper case files to inform care. The case stories in this document are true accounts of how lack of access to key information adversely affects the ability of families and caregivers to provide quality care to a child or youth in foster care, and how it negatively impacts foster children and youth themselves. These stories illustrate how changes to the Child Welfare Services data system and other relevant electronic information exchange efforts could support providers and others in providing quality services and, in turn, improve outcomes for children and youth in foster care.
The California Dental Association and The Children’s Partnership are co-sponsoring AB 648 to ensure the Virtual Dental Home (VDH)—an innovative and cost-effective system for providing dental care to California’s most vulnerable children and adults in community settings—can be spread across the state.
AB 648 would:
- Authorize a one-time, $4 million General Fund appropriation to establish a Virtual Dental Home grant program, under the leadership and direction of the State Dental Director, for the purpose of expanding the VDH into the state’s areas of greatest need; and
- Authorize the allocation of grant funds for activities that support VDH implementation, including training, community based learning collaboratives, technical assistance and equipment.
This fact sheet describes the health and well-being challenges children and youth in foster care face, and outlines the potential for developing electronic information exchange in California to address these challenges. Examples of this type of electronic care coordination in other states are provided.
The Virtual Dental Home
New advances in technology are announced every day, but often overlooked is the opportunity to turn these advances into better oral health for underserved children and adults. The Virtual Dental Home, being demonstrated by the Pacific Center for Special Care at the University of the Pacific Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry (Pacific), combines technological advances with innovations in workforce to reach underserved children and adults with the dental care they need. And now—thanks to groundbreaking legislation enacted in 2014—the Virtual Dental Home has the potential to become a sustainable and scalable model for delivering dental care.
In California today, there are over 62,000 children and youth in foster care, many of whom face instability in their homes, schools, and health care. While many foster youth overcome significant adverse experiences to become healthy and productive adults, for others the challenges can last a lifetime. Foster youth often have multiple, unique health and academic needs, but, because of frequent changes in their medical care, families, and the schools they attend, efforts to help them are often disjointed.
Digital technology offers a powerful opportunity to build information sharing into practice in a way that other coordination efforts have not. Electronic care coordination promotes more effective and reliable connections among caregivers, health providers, educators, and youth themselves. This can ease foster youth’s transitions into adulthood and help them connect to the right resources they need to lead healthy and productive lives. This report outlines the current landscape for foster youth and the top benefits electronic care coordination can provide to alleviate their pressing needs.
ALL IN’s First Progress Report summarizes ALL IN For Health’s many accomplishments to date—including making nearly 650,000 contacts with parents, students, and school employees across California about their health coverage options. In this new report, learn how education leaders, like you, made a difference, and find out how ALL IN For Health will help you with health coverage throughout the 2014–2015 school year.
In 2011, the State of California established an “audacious goal” to provide an electronic personal health record (PHR) to every child and youth in foster care that would enable information sharing and linkages across data systems, providers, and agencies that serve them. In 2012, the California Health eQuality (CheQ) program awarded a small planning grant to The Children’s Partnership to pull together stakeholders, review the research and current initiatives, and develop a Strategic Plan to help California policymakers, funders, public officials, and advocates chart a path forward to implement this “audacious goal.”
This report highlights the Strategic Plan and the progress made since it was completed in 2013. Consistent with the Plan’s recommendations, a variety of public and private partners, including The Children’s Partnership, have been implementing two county demonstration projects to test two models for providing an electronic personal health record to children and youth in foster care, measure the impact of the PHR on their lives, and generate lessons learned for scaling the model to other counties and/or statewide. Additionally, The Children’s Partnership is convening a variety of stakeholders to brainstorm ideas for incorporating a link to a PHR into California’s new Child Welfare Services data system (CWS/NS), now under design. In the near future, The Children’s Partnership will initiate a learning community of counties currently engaged in electronic information exchange to share lessons learned and best practices for implementing a PHR for children and youth in foster care.
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