Scaling Enhanced Care Management Services for Higher Risk Youth through PATH Funding

The Novel Interventions in Children’s Healthcare (NICH) Program at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals is pleased to share how Providing Access and Transforming Health (PATH) Capacity and Infrastructure Transition, Expansion, and Development (CITED) funding has allowed it to make necessary investments to deliver quality community-based services for their young clients.   

The NICH program serves youth with significant medical and psychosocial challenges. NICH exists at the most intensive end of the Medi-Cal Enhanced Care Management (ECM) care spectrum, helping our higher risk young people, who have not responded to other care approaches in the past, gain access to the right care for them.   

This multi-component program provides daily contact in person and/or virtually, and families can seek support outside of traditional business hours. The program also delivers home- and community-based services, typically for one year.  

The NICH patient population includes families from historically marginalized communities. The overwhelming majority of these families experience cultural, financial, geographical, and linguistic barriers to effective disease management. For this reason, NICH strives to address health equity issues.  

NICH’s existing ECM partnerships allow the program to serve several local counties in need of these services; however, the program is regularly overwhelmed with referrals from counties outside of its current service area. The result is geographic health equity misalignment. What’s more, these high-need counties are over-represented by youth of color and lower socioeconomic status.  

The NICH waitlist includes youth who providers have identified as not benefiting from other available services and who are at high risk of life-altering complications. NICH- and ECM-eligible youth should have access to an intervention that matches the intensity of their need, regardless of where they live.  

For this reason, NICH applied for PATH CITED Round 2 funding to strengthen its infrastructure and building capacity in these counties. Only then could the program pursue ECM contracting and create a more sustainable program able to meet these counties’ long-term needs.  

With PATH CITED Round 2 funding, NICH is pleased to announce that the program will hire, train, and support two new NICH providers who will help expand the program’s capacity and geographic reach. The funding will help the program expand by improving its infrastructure. CITED funding and subsequent ECM-related growth will allow the program to broaden its geographic presence in the name of NICH’s mission: health equity.