Reducing access barriers through transportation innovations

Lack of access to reliable transportation is one of the most pervasive barriers to healthcare access for poor and low-income children in the United States. In response to this challenge, The Children's Health Fund (CHF) has established the Child Health Transportation Initiative (CHTI), a three-year program of research, advocacy and grant support to transportation-disadvantaged communities. CHTI research efforts to identify and describe possible solutions for improving healthcare-related transportation for children are presented elsewhere.

A key focus of the CHTI is to support community-based transportation programs that can lead to better access to healthcare for children and their parents. With financial and technical support through the CHTI, pilot healthcare transportation projects are being established in six sites in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee. Local circumstances and locally-developed solutions differ across the pilot sites. CHF expects to monitor and evaluate the pilot projects throughout the course of the Initiative. In this presentation, we will present progress to date on the implementation of the pilot projects.

Through the pilot projects, CHF seeks to demonstrate that access to adequate transportation for non-emergency child health conditions can result in fewer missed child healthcare appointments, less use of emergency transportation for non-emergency conditions and lower hospitalization rates for tracer child health conditions. From a program development perspective, lessons learned at the community level will serve as useful inputs for transportation-disadvantaged communities seeking to improve healthcare access through better coordination of existing transportation resources and via improved communication and collaboration between healthcare providers and the transportation sector.