Advancing Goal Concordant Care Through
Help Me Grow Implementation
Most U.S. children who enter kindergarten are delayed in their health, social-emotional, and/or cognitive development. These gaps have been present for decades, yet early childhood systems have failed to close them. To foster optimal short- and long-term outcomes for young children, it is necessary to systematically elicit parents’ and caregivers’ goals and priorities, and establish partnership with them in creating pathways toward achievement of health and developmental goals for their children.
What does goal concordant care mean for early
childhood systems?
Goal concordant care is a strengths-based approach to eliciting parents’ goals for their child’s well-being that elevates families’ goals as drivers in the process of developmental promotion, early identification of concern, referral, and linkage.
The Help Me Grow National Center envisions early childhood systems that share power with the families they serve, are driven by co-developed goals, and enhance conditions for promoting equity and inclusiveness.
Project Overview
What We Are Trying to Achieve
Over the last twenty-five years of HMG implementation, there has been an evolution in the approaches used to engage families, community-based partners, and child health care providers.
Initial outreach and engagement efforts sought expertise from professionals who study communities and create policy recommendations. Then, in response to feedback such as “nothing for us without us”, community engagement activities increasingly began to solicit direct input from families with lived experience using tools such as surveys and focus groups. More recently, we have embraced a commitment to resourcing and supporting families in order to honor and compensate for their contributions in co-production and co-leadership.
The HMG Model’s Key Activities provide multiple opportunities to integrate processes that can support parent/caregiver goal identification and elicitation, which then serve as the imperative for how HMG organizes its response and resources. We recognize that there is significant potential for goal concordant care to be an important driver for early childhood system transformation through HMG Model implementation.
We are studying the application of goal-setting and goal-monitoring through HMG and the infrastructure it establishes, and the impact that goal-setting and monitoring has on advancing parent-identified priorities for family well-being and child health and development.
At the end of this two year project, the HMG National Center and Affiliate Network will be well-positioned to further expand the authentic engagement of families and caregivers by incorporating a collaborative approach with families determining the desirable outcomes for HMG’s efforts.
What We Are Doing
This project will identify, test, and refine ways in which HMG can support the systematic partnering with parents to co-define and prioritize their goals for their child, family and community.
Through a request for participants to be released in spring 2022, the HMG National Center will select a small group of affiliates to participate in a year-long learning community consisting of leaders from affiliate backbone organizations, Core Component leads, and partnering pediatric primary care clinics.
Our four overlapping objectives
1. Provide capacity building opportunities that support the Help Me Grow National Affiliate Network in efforts to design, implement, assess, and improve early childhood systems in authentic partnership with families.
Project partners including University at Buffalo Motivational Interviewing Center (UBMIC), Be Strong Families, Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) and Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE) will offer capacity building opportunities and useful resources to the National Affiliate Network in order to broadly support HMG systems in leveraging critical opportunities to elicit family priorities and enable parents to co-determine goals of care with their providers. See Project Partners below for more.
2. Benchmark optimal Help Me Grow Model practices that promote regard for parent-led concerns and coordinate services to meet family goals.
With CSSP, the HMG National Center will map existing performance measures to assess their functional equivalence with five Protective Factors: parental resilience, social connections, healthy parent-child dynamics, concrete supports as needed, and social and emotional growth (i.e., Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework).
3. Establish an advisory workgroup to develop and refine the tools, methods, and technical assistance to help Help Me Grow affiliates and their clinical partners elicit and negotiate goals of care, document and monitor their progress, and assess care outcomes and goal-attainment.
Project partners including UBMIC, Be Strong Families, and HOPE (see Project Partners below for more) will contribute expertise on:
A) Outreach and engagement through parent-led, peer-to-peer support networks.
B) Motivational interviewing techniques and approaches to elicit family-centered priorities and aspirations.
C) Family assessment techniques to emphasize positive childhood experiences in care planning.
D) Evaluation and outcome frameworks that correlate HMG with impacting the protective factors.
4. Implement, document, and disseminate new, promising Help Me Grow workflows.
The HMG National Center will assess the impact of these new competencies on the experience of care from the standpoint of parents and their providers, and on affiliate performance from the standpoint of goal-attainment, shared decision-making, mutual accountability, and targeted universalism.
Our Framework
A Framework for Advancing Goal Concordant Care through
Help Me Grow
This framework is intended as a resource to support HMG affiliates leverage existing HMG infrastructure in order to effectively elicit parents’ goals for their child’s well-being and ensure those goals drive resource allocation, decisions, referrals and priorities for service delivery by all community-based providers working with a given family.
Our Methods
Drawing on user-centered design and quality improvement methods, we will evaluate the impact of shared goal-setting and monitoring on HMG system implementation, as well as on provider and parent satisfaction. The study will illuminate parents’ perceived barriers and motivators for articulating and attaining goals as well as areas of alignment or tension between parent-stated priorities and institutional incentives and mandates.
The study also aims to produce:
- Performance improvement opportunities for the HMG National Affiliate Network.
- Related insights for national early childhood stakeholders.
- Valuable information on behavioral and attitudinal shifts among community of practice affiliate participants and partners.
- Specifics related to necessary resource conditions (such as early childhood system infrastructure, state or local assets, and available technology) that foster the use of shared goal-setting and mutual accountability across stakeholders.
Our Project Partners
This project is powered by partnership.
The Help Me Grow National Center is joined by:
Learn More About the Project
Project Partner Webinar Series
Meet the Project Partners
HMG National Center hosted a series of webinars in January 2022 to introduce the project partners, their core principles, and how they support organizations and systems in integrating those principles. Partners each shared some key tools and resources that any HMG system might consider in their local efforts to advance goal concordant care.
All HMG systems are highly encouraged to attend this full webinar series. In order to be eligible to apply to the learning community opportunity in 2022, HMG systems must attend all four of the project partner webinars. If unable to attend any of the sessions live, recordings will be available to view at a later date. Systems that do not expect to apply to the upcoming learning community are still highly encouraged to attend any or all webinars in this series as they will offer practical approaches, resources, and tools that may be applied in order to advance goal concordant care through HMG implementation.
January 6, 2022
Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE)
Presentation Slides • Watch Webinar • Tools Any HMG Can Use
January 13, 2022
Be Strong Families
Presentation Slides • Watch Webinar • Tools Any HMG Can Use
January 20, 2022
Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP)
Presentation Slides • Watch Webinar • Tools Any HMG Can Use
January 27, 2022
University at Buffalo Motivational Interviewing Center (UBMIC)
Presentation Slides • Watch Webinar • Tools Any HMG Can Use
How to Participate in the Project
This project will develop, test, and refine the tools, infrastructure, protocols, workflows, and standards to elicit family goals and priorities and enable parents to co-determine goals of care with their providers.
Through a request for participants (RFP), the HMG National Center will select a small group of affiliates to participate in a year-long community of practice consisting of leaders from affiliate backbone organizations and from partnering pediatric primary care clinics. The RFP will be released in spring 2022.
All applicants will be required to have attended all sessions in a series of webinars to be held in January 2022 (See Project Partner Webinar Series above), introducing the project partners, their core principles, and main modes of capacity building technical assistance. Note: If interested applicants are unable to attend any of these webinar sessions live, viewing full session recordings is an acceptable alternative.
Affiliates who do not expect to submit an RFP to participate in this project are still highly encouraged to attend any or all webinars in this series as they will offer practical approaches, resources, and tools that may be applied in order to advance goal concordant care through HMG implementation.
