Doctor’s Note: September Newsletter Introduction from Dr. Sandy Chung

Whew! We made it through the summer!

Hopefully, you had an opportunity to take a break this summer to relax and enjoy time with your loved ones. As you can imagine, my summer as AAP President has been busy, and I have enjoyed traveling to visit with pediatricians across the country and the world. Advocacy has also been an integral part of my summer having had the privilege of taking two trips to the White House, testifying before Congress, and representing pediatrics at stakeholder meetings with federal agencies. Topics have included mental health access, childhood nutrition, supporting primary care, immigrant health, equity, clinician wellbeing, and much more.

As you know, we have several new immunizations and therapeutics that will impact our practices clinically and financially. These notably include COVID-19 vaccines, RSV monoclonal antibody (nirsevimab), and Pneumococcal 20. For months, AAP has been advocating with multiple stakeholders involved in the necessary processes for a more seamless rollout of these products. While much progress was made from the initial state of affairs, as with any new product, we expect there to be issues that will still need to be solved. Please feel free to reach out if you have concerns or identify issues.

Now that we have made it through well-check season, September typically is the time we turn towards the preparation for fall vaccination efforts and “sick season”. Along with that, we should remember to focus on the multiple value-based agreements we are in where the measure period ends at the end of calendar year. This means that we have 3-4 months to close our quality measurement gaps so that we can be clinically and financially successful in our value-based care contracts.

Our population health platform Arcadia has most of the Pediatric Health Network practices’ data integrated. This is a wonderful tool that is free to you and allows you to identify which of your patients have not met the quality measures. Since many of the measures are related to well visits and immunizations, now is a great time to try to schedule those visits before the end of 2023. Our value-based contract payments require that we meet minimum thresholds on these measures as a network, so we each have a role closing quality measures so that we can all succeed together.

I’ve had an opportunity to learn about pediatric networks across the country and the Pediatric Health Network is on the leading edge of value-based care for pediatrics. We should be proud of our work and I look forward to working together for many more years to come.

Thank you all for taking wonderful care of children and adolescents in our communities!

Warmly,
Sandy Chung, M.D.
PHN Medical Director