NOI_W27008.docx

Department of Public Health Bureau of Family Health and Nutrition Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood Notice of Intent: Waiver 27008

GENERAL DESCRIPTION: The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) Bureau of Family Health and Nutrition (BFHN) is applying for the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood (TPEC) notice of funding opportunity HRSA-26-104. HRSA will award 10 grants nationally for up to $950,000 each for 5 years.

The purpose of this grant is to prevent chronic disease early in life and promote healthy development in early childhood by supporting the placement of early childhood development (ECD) experts in local pediatric practices that primarily serve children enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP to deliver team-based care to young children and their families.

Grant funding would enable the Department of Public Health to enhance and scale existing practice transformation, quality improvement, and health care policy and finance initiatives to spread integrated, team-based primary care for young children to practices across the Commonwealth. To accomplish this, MDPH intends to continue to work with partners with unique expertise in integrated pediatric primary care models, including a national evidence-based model (e.g., Healthy Steps[footnoteRef:1]) and a state practice-based evidence model (e.g., TEAM UP[footnoteRef:2]). These partners will provide model implementation and early childhood integration capacity building support to embed, evaluate, and sustain ECD experts and high-quality services for young children in primary care teams. [1: https://www.healthysteps.org/ ] [2: https://teamupforchildren.org/]

The grant requirements are as follows:

· Place early childhood development (ECD) experts in pediatric practices that primarily serve families covered by Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and deliver high-quality ECD services using a team-based approach.

· Build the skills of pediatric primary care staff statewide to deliver high-quality ECD services using a team-based approach.

· Improve statewide administrative policies and financing strategies to expand and sustain team-based pediatric primary care, improving the standard of care for all young children.

The purpose of this notice is to publicize the MDPH/BFHN intent to submit a federal grant application naming the TEAM UP Scaling and Sustainability Center (TEAM UP) as its partner. MDPH/BFHN intends to contract with TEAM UP because the organization is uniquely qualified to provide technical assistance in pediatric integrated care practice transformation and continuous quality improvement support for the proposed project. TEAM UP, based at Boston Medical Center, has a decade of experience promoting positive child health and well-being through the consistent delivery of innovative evidence-based integrated care. To date in Massachusetts, TEAM UP has partnered with 14 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) and pediatric primary care practices to implement a full continuum of early childhood (EC) services within pediatric primary care. Over the past four years their work has expanded across four additional states to reach an average of 127,000 children annually.

TEAM UP has successfully established a program of practice-based coaching that utilizes nationally recognized quality improvement tools to support sustainability of model implementation. Their experience providing practice-based coaching includes a focus on organizational and operational support to ensure FQHCs can sustain the model long-term and an explicit attention to team building in order to allow each member of the care team to work to their fullest potential, which is especially relevant to models that integrate family partner/clinician teams. Leveraging their existing training and practice transformation curriculum, TEAM UP supports practices through a complement of in person and virtual training designed to increase practitioner comfort and confidence working with families with young children ages 0-5 and supporting caregiver-child dyads. Support for organizational leadership will ensure the systems and infrastructure are developed alongside clinical capacity building to enable full integration and sustainability.

TEAM UP brings deep continuous quality improvement (CQI) experience which is extremely well aligned with the goals of the project. The team has successfully worked with practices to identify a core set of metrics for CQI efforts, including encounters with primary care providers, behavioral health clinicians, and family partners and provide the foundation to assess CQI activities.

TEAM UP will assist in capacity building to support integration, quality improvement, and sustainability of ECD experts and high-quality early childhood services within a subset of primary care practices who are implementing the TEAM UP model. TPEC would partner with TEAM UP to support early childhood practice transformation and quality improvement activities in participating practice sites, including establishing workflows, maximizing billing, EMR integration, and teaming. TEAM UP will support early childhood continuous quality improvement activities at participating practices and will create tools to facilitate the sharing of practice aims, CQI metrics and outcomes with MDPH and project partners. TEAM UP will also collaborate with MDPH to provide ECD integration resources and capacity building supports to a broader range of practices through a virtual Early Childhood Integration Learning Network.

If you have equal qualifications to the organization mentioned above and would like to be considered for partnership on this grant, send qualifications along with any questions or comments with the subject line: Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood Project in writing to Eve Wilder at eve.wilder@mass.gov by 07/02/26 at 4:00 PM