Title:Georgetown’s Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health leads innovation for providers nationwide

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the country in 2020, health centers saw a dramatic drop-off in children’s wellness check-ups. Telemedicine offered a solution, but was it effective? 

For answers, health professionals across the country turned to Georgetown’s National Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health (NCEMCH), which provides national leadership to the maternal and child health community in three key areas: systems-wide program development, competency-based education, and evidence-based decision making. 

“We were able to provide an evidence base to show that telemedicine actually works, and the backup training for states to enable it,” says John Richards, the center’s executive director. 

“It opened a whole new world of possibilities. Because you can spend more time with the family, telehealth gives practitioners an opportunity to dig a little deeper than they might have.”

Established in 1982 and primarily funded through grants from the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA)’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau, NCEMCH has been at the forefront of innovation in maternal and children’s health, including initial development of the Bright Futures guidelines for well-child care. The center also pioneered “microlearning” through its MCH Navigator online education portal—“learning that happens in short bursts at defined times,” Richards says. 

“We’ve been working on resilience—the Navigator has a new spotlight on preventing burnout,” he adds, pointing to the exceptionally high turnover among public health professionals in the wake of the pandemic. “They are literally in battle mode.”

In addition to its national outreach, the center has established a long-term partnership with the Washington, D.C., Department of Health Care Finance, training and certifying providers for pediatric patients covered by Medicaid to ensure uniform standards of care. 

“Over the years, we’ve come up with this amazing system of training and outreach—I think D.C. is the best in the country,” Richards says. He notes that compliance has risen from a pre-program 25% to a current rate of 98%. “So that’s the good we do in our own backyard.”

“We’re the innovators. That’s the whole point of sponsored research at the university—building these federal and state partnerships to advance children’s health,” Richards says. 

“All of this has been thrown under the microscope during COVID-19,” he adds. “It makes all of the work we do even more important.”