Washington-- U.S. Senator Evan Bayh today announced a significant legislative victory for his proposal to improve the quality of children’s health care in the United States.

The proposal, co-authored with Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, would provide the authority and resources to develop and test quality measures for children’s health care. It was included in the Senate Finance Committee’s bill reauthorizing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The full Senate is expected to consider the legislation reauthorizing SCHIP, which expires in September, as early as next week.

“If one hospital develops a procedure that reduces infection rates in children who are being treated for a certain illness or injury, that information must be shared,” Senator Bayh said. “This proposal would make it possible for life-saving procedures to be widely replicated and disseminated to doctors, nurses and other medical professionals who are treating children across this country. Every parent wants to be assured that their child’s doctor has the latest and best resources at his or her fingertips. As a father, I do. This proposal is a significant step toward making sure that happens.”

Currently, most private and public support for health care quality improvement is focused on care given to adults. The bipartisan proposal included in the SCHIP bill would provide $45 million over five years to invest in the development and testing of quality measures for children’s health care.

In addition to providing this funding, the bill would make it possible for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to fund demonstrations of evidence-based approaches to improve hospital care for children. The bill also would fund demonstrations of model programs in pediatric health information technology and disease management. CMS currently lacks the explicit authority and resources to provide the level of support required for the development of pediatric measures for children in both Medicaid and SCHIP, as do individual state Medicaid and SCHIP programs.

“When fully implemented, policy makers and consumers will be able to use the information generated by these measures to evaluate program performance and to select the providers that best meet their health care needs,” said Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, President of the March of Dimes. “In short, pediatric quality measures will strengthen program accountability and simultaneously provide information essential to the improvement of health services for infants and children.”

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