Regionalized Pediatric Emergency Care in Rural Pennsylvania

Regionalized Pediatric Emergency Care in Rural Pennsylvania: the Optimizing Utilization and Rural Emergency Access for Children Study

The overall goal of this project is to develop and evaluate an organized, regional system of pediatric emergency care in rural western Pennsylvania.

The OUTREACH project will develop, implement and evaluate an organized system of regional pediatric emergency care in rural western Pennsylvania. Toward that end the investigators have developed three broad goals: (1) to define the key barriers and potential solutions to regionalized pediatric emergency care through community stakeholder engagement; (2) to implement a regionalized system of pediatric emergency care using education, community outreach and telemedicine; and (3) evaluate the impact of the system on health care access and outcomes for rural children. The investigators will implement the intervention in a sample of rural hospitals in Pennsylvania using a staggered roll-out design, and compare outcomes of children seen in these hospitals to similar matched hospitals in the state, using Pennsylvania state Medicaid data to evaluate the impact of the intervention.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Pennsylvania
• Medicaid beneficiary
• Less than or equal to 18 years of age

Exclusion Criteria:

• None