PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 11 /EMWNews/ -- The Children's

Hospital of Philadelphia will receive a $247,000 grant from The

Commonwealth Fund to support research to test a new method of identifying

children at risk for developmental delays and to recommend new programs for

preventive care.



    The study, called "Tailoring Pediatric Preventive Care to Individual

Needs, Phase 2: Validating a New Instrument" will be a part of the Fund's

program on Child Development and Preventive Care. Researchers at Children's

Hospital will test whether a series of questions helps pediatricians

identify children at risk for developmental delays. The researchers plan to

use their results to help design service packages to meet the specific

needs of children at different risk levels.



    "Those children with more challenging problems could benefit from more

frequent visits to their doctor, but we don't yet know how to identify

those children," said project director Susmita Pati, M.D., M.P.H. "Right

now it is a one-size-fits-all approach to pediatric primary care and there

is no program for differential insurance reimbursement."



    This study may help families with greater needs gain access to more

frequent and longer visits with their pediatrician, more help on parenting,

frequent interaction with the support staff, and home visits by a nurse or

case worker, Pati said.



    An earlier Commonwealth Fund project entitled "Tiered Health

Supervision," developed the brief set of about a dozen questions to allow

doctors to obtain information on individual children and prescribe targeted

preventive services. With this second grant, Children's Hospital

researchers plan to test the effectiveness of that questionnaire for 2,100

children up to age three. The resulting risk scores will be compared

against results of developmental screening and health care utilization data

collected by a separate Centers for Disease Control study.



    Other Children's Hospital researchers in the project include

co-investigators Christopher Forrest, M.D., Ph.D., and James Guevara, M.D.,

M.P.H; and statistician Russell Localio, Ph.D. Forrest helped develop the

questionnaire, which includes predictors such as sociodemographics, birth

weight, family environment, child care and receipt of health care.



    "The importance of this study is very practical: We know early school

failure is related to developmental delays," Pati explains. "We picked out

10 to 15 items that will have reasonable predictive accuracy to how

children perform in school by age seven. We want to identify those children

who can benefit from more services as early as possible."



    Dr. Pati currently is a pediatrician and health services researcher who

examines the impact of policy on health care access for underserved

children and families. She is an attending general pediatrician at

Children's Hospital and Senior Fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute of

Health Economics and Associate Scholar at the Center for Clinical

Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her prior

work focused on the impact of welfare reform on underserved populations and

trends in public spending on social welfare programs. Presently, she is

funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to

identify predictors of Medicaid retention among underserved children and

families and to examine the impact of maternal health literacy on

participation in child social welfare programs.



    The Commonwealth Fund, among the first private foundations started by a

woman philanthropist -- Anna M. Harkness -- was established in 1918 with

the broad charge to enhance the common good. The mission of The

Commonwealth Fund is to promote a high performing health care system that

achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency,

particularly for society's most vulnerable, including low-income people,

the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.



    The Fund carries out this mandate by supporting independent research on

health care issues and making grants to improve health care practice and

policy. An international program in health policy is designed to stimulate

innovative policies and practices in the United States and other

industrialized countries.



    The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the

nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to

providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric

healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives,

Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited

children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in

the country, ranking third in National Institutes of Health funding. In

addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have

brought the 430-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children

and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.



    CONTACT: Juliann Walsh



    Media Relations Specialist



    Phone (267) 426-6054



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