Original Posting 10.05.18
From healthy birth weight to school readiness, Chemung County is on the path to tracking the developmental progress of all children from birth to age 5. The project started years ago with school districts wanting to look at school readiness. They worked with Children's Institute to bring RECAP to Chemung County. With RECAP they looked at assessing social-emotional health and other domains for Pre-K students with a focus on getting kids ready for kindergarden.
Jump forward a few years, enter CIDS and their infant registration program. Because of the smaller size of their county and having only one hospital, CIDS was able to interact with the families each time a baby was born in their county. At the hospital, a nurse would ask the family a few simple questions and record data about the mother and the child's health. The County had a goal of wanting to connect all this information together - from birth to school age.
The group decided to use COMET because of our connection with the Chemung RECAP team, who were already using the system. Two years later we've rolled out a case management system that records when a child is born and tracks referrals that may be made to programs like Nurse-Family Partnership or Healthy Families. As the kids grow and enter Pre-K, the system will have all their data going back to that initial infant registration on the day they were born. That's pretty cool!
Click the links below to learn more about this project!