Massachusetts’ Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA)
Quality Demonstration Grant
Project Overview – May 2012
In February, 2010, Massachusetts was one of 10 grantees awarded a five year CMS CHIPRA Quality Demonstration
grant. Massachusetts’ CHIPRA Project (the Project) is led by five partners: MassHealth, Children’s Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality, and University
of Massachusetts Medical School. The Project supports the development and maintenance of an integrated
approach to measurement and improvement across all settings of child health care delivery that will lead to
transformational gains in children’s health and outcomes. The Project is undertaking activities in three areas:
Category A: Testing a set of 24 measures of pediatric healthcare quality recommended by Secretary Sebelius
 The Project will collect and test the core set of child health quality measures in 2012 and in 2013.
 Data will be collected from multiple sources, including public and private payers, state agencies, and practices.
 Performance measures will be calculated where possible at the provider practice level, and also at more macro
levels (statewide, Medicaid-enrolled).
 Results will be reported to providers, families, state agencies, and other stakeholders, and feedback on the
measures in the Core Measures set, and on the reporting, will be obtained from those entities.
 Analyses on the measure results will be undertaken, to facilitate a better understanding of how best to use the
core measures set in supporting improvements in pediatric health care quality.
In the process of undertaking this large-scale data collection, performance measure calculation, and reporting
process, the Project will gather critical information on the relevance, feasibility, and reliability of the measures, and
determine which measures can be reported at the provider practice level.
Category C: Supporting implementation of a medical home model of care at several practices across the state
 The Project is working with a group of diverse child-serving practices to enhance their ability to provide family
and child-centric care, measure and improve that care, and improve outcomes for children.
 Participating practices have formed multi-disciplinary practice-based teams, including parent partners and one
practice team member designated to facilitate efforts to achieve practice transformation. Each team is receiving
support from the Department of Public Health’s Program for Children and Youth with Special Health Care
Needs’ Care Coordination program.
 Participating practices are receiving technical and financial support to transform into medical home practices.
Technical support is being provided through a Learning Collaborative, which is using data to assist practice
teams in achieving certain core competencies that are hallmarks of a medical home model of care.
The Massachusetts CHIPRA Project expects an outcome of this project component to be materials and activities that
can be implemented to support the dissemination of the medical home model of care to child-serving practices that
are not participating in the CHIPRA medical home project.
Category E: Building a sustainable statewide coalition to improve child health quality
The Massachusetts CHIPRA Project has convened a broad-based, multi-stakeholder coalition with a sustainable
governance and operational structure. The Massachusetts Child Health Quality Coalition (Coalition) is envisioned
as being a sustainable body that will champion and advocate for child health care quality and measurement by acting
as a vehicle for developing a shared understanding of pediatric health care quality priorities and a platform for
formulating and implementing system-wide goals and objectives.
The Massachusetts CHIPRA Project expects the outcome of this project component to be:
1) a broadly endorsed roadmap for improving the quality of care delivered to children in Massachusetts that
prioritizes important new measurement and improvement activities, with both short- and long-term goals
2) the identification and development of measures additional to those included in the core measurement set that
reflect quality in key areas of care delivery and that could be relevant for statewide and national data collection;
and
3) demonstrated success of the Coalition as a vehicle for creating a shared understanding of pediatric health care
priorities and a platform for formulating and implementing system wide goals and objectives .
For more information on the CHIPRA Grant, contact Louise Bannister at louise.bannister@state.ma.us