AHRQ’s Health Care Innovations Exchange Focuses on Reducing Health Disparities Among Children

The December 19 issue of AHRQ’s Health Care Innovations Exchange profiles efforts to reduce health disparities among children. Profiles describe a program that provided culturally competent asthma care to Latino families, a State policy that increased access to Medicaid coverage for uninsured children, and a medical center’s use of text messaging to increase vaccination rates among low-income minority children. In Louisiana, an initiative known as Express Lane Eligibility, uses a data-matching program to automatically enroll qualified low-income children in Medicaid based on information submitted to the State's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As a result, low-income children, hard-to-enroll populations, and those with inadequate coverage have access to a wide range of health care services. The program has also significantly reduced the number of uninsured children in the State and has lowered administrative costs for the Louisiana Medicaid program. View more innovation profiles and tools related to children’s health disparities on the Innovations Exchange Web site, which contains more than 750 searchable innovations and 1,500 QualityTools.