Health Aspects of Kindergarten Readiness

Overview and Background

Oregon is leading the nation in developing a strategy to engage the health sector in kindergarten readiness. A four-part measurement strategy was developed by the Health Aspects of Kindergarten Readiness Workgroup and was endorsed by both the Metrics and Scoring Committee and Health Plan Quality Metrics Committee. The first two metrics were included in the 2020 CCO Incentive Measure Set (Well-Child Visits and Preventive Dental Visits measures). Partners at the Oregon Pediatric Improvement Partnership and Children’s Institute have been leading work to develop a new system-level metric focused on identifying and connecting young children with social emotional health needs to services. This effort is in close partnership with the Oregon Health Authority.

Timeline of Measure Development Activities and Milestones

September 2018: Health Aspects of Kindergarten Readiness Technical Workgroup endorses System-Level Social-Emotional Health Metric to be included in four-part measurement strategy recommendations.
November 2018: Metrics and Scoring Committee unanimously endorses Health Aspects of Kindergarten Readiness four-part measurement strategy.
January 2019: Health Plan Quality Metrics Committee unanimously endorses four-part measurement strategy.
2019-2020: Oregon Pediatric Improvement Partnership, Children’s Institute, and Oregon Health Authority develop draft metric components based on learnings from improvement pilots and stakeholder feedback.
November 2020: Metrics and Scoring reviewed measure progress to date and strongly supports moving into the pilot phase to broaden testing base and collect data to assess feasibility, reliability, and validity.
January 2021: Review of CCO System-Level Social-Emotional Health Attestation Metric and Pilot Project with Metrics Technical Advisory Group (January 28th).
February 2021: Metric development team launches CCO pilot to gain CCO input on the CCO System-Level Social-Emotional Health Metric measure components and draft specifications.
January 2022: CCO System-Level Social-Emotional Health Metric included in 2022 CCO Incentive Program.