Specialists from a proven program — Birth-to-Three — are being placed in two pediatric offices to test whether developmental delays in children can be spotted and addressed more quickly, especially for children of color, who are often diagnosed far later than white children.
Any child with a significant delay, no matter the family income, is eligible for Birth-to-Three services, which usually take place in the home. If parents have a chance to connect with a program specialist in a place they trust — their pediatricians’ office — then many of the usual barriers to participation, such as following through on a referral, allowing a stranger into the home, uncertainty over the intent of the program, should fall away, said Dr. Thyde Dumont-Mathieu.
She is a developmental pediatrician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. The hospital has received a grant of about $60,000 from the Connecticut Health Foundation to pair Birth-to-Three staff members, who work for private agencies that have contracts with the state, with doctors in two pediatric practices.
“You’re gaining efficiencies — you’re not chasing down parents to set up a time, you’re giving parents a chance to overcome any hesitancy. By getting the child connected to services quickly, you’re going to keep some of them from falling off the radar,” said Dumont-Mathieu.
The grant creates an opportunity for Connecticut Children’s to “focus on addressing the significant disparities in access to early intervention services,” said Tiffany Donelson, vice president of programs at the Connecticut Health Foundation. “We are hopeful that this approach can lead to broader change by identifying models that improve care.”
Dumont-Mathieu and others will watch to see if the experiment achieves the desired results — improving the early detection and treatment of autism and other developmental conditions, and giving children from minority backgrounds the same access to the services as white children.
“We can detect autism by 2, but the average age is 4, and for children of color, it’s 6,” said Dumont-Mathieu. “When that happens, they need more support and more services in their lives.”
If the experiment works, the next step is to figure out how to spread it across the state and keep it going, at a time when federal and state funding for health care, even the programs that make economic sense, are drying up.
It would likely involve a partnership between the state, the private-sector and charitable foundations.
“It’s going to be a challenge,” said Lynn Johnson of the state Office of Early Childhood, which manages Birth-to-Three.
But Johnson said the model that is being tested here has a chance to prove itself highly valuable and beneficial.
Dr. Sandra Carbonari agreed. She’s a pediatrician and president of the state chapter of the Academy of Pediatrics.
“Birth-to-Three is a great program. Anything that is going to increase our ability to link kids that we are concerned about with these kinds of evaluations and services is going to be a great help,” said Carbonari.
Normally, when a developmental screening in the pediatrician’s office turns up a red flag, the parent is told to contact the child development information line at 1-800-505-7000, or though 2-1-1 Infoline.
“But there are several steps to the referral and things can fall apart,” said Carbonari. “It could be as simple as a parent not wanting to answer the phone [when Birth-to-Three calls] because she doesn’t recognize the phone number.”
Making the initial connection in the doctor’s office gets the process started on a much firmer footing, Dumont-Mathieu said.
For the fiscal year ending in June 2016, Birth-to-Three saw 10,288 Connecticut children.
