Coordinated Care for ADHD
CAVU Funding: $20,000
Newly funded program launched Fall 2010
The Coordinated Care for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CC-ADHD) pilot employs a continuous quality improvement process to adapt an established model of adult depression care to the treatment of low-income children with ADHD. The goal of the initial phase is to optimize the performance of a novel ADHD care delivery system, and to assure that the care delivered under the system is evidence-based. CAVU has partnered with Boston Medical Center on this program, so that the program can be simultaneously implemented at BMC and, with CAVU's support, at Whittier Street Health Center.
The CC-ADHD pilot borrows from the IMPACT model of depression care (Improving Mood - Providing Access to Collaborative Treatment), which aligns primary care providers with care managers to develop and implement guideline-based treatment plans. Like IMPACT, CC-ADHD employs a care manager and a consultant ADHD specialist (a developmental behavioral pediatrician). The care manager is trained in the principles of ADHD management, as well as in motivational interviewing.
Specific activities of CC-ADHD are as follows:
- Through a series of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) improvement cycles, the team adapts the role of IMPACT's two new designated team members - the care manager and the consultant specialist - to assist primary care providers in caring for children with ADHD.
- The team monitors and optimizes the implementation process through continuous tracking of standardized measures of adherence to ADHD management guidelines concerning diagnosis, treatment, outcomes tracking, and stepped care.
- The team is piloting an optimized system to assess individual patient and family outcomes: the burden of ADHD symptoms, school performance, social skills, parental stress, and parental depression.