Establishing a tool to identify children with medical complexity using administrative datasets in the Maritime provinces
This project aims to better understand the population of children with medical complexity in the Maritime provinces.
Even though they make up less than one percent of the pediatric population, children with medical complexity account for about one-third of all the money spent on children’s healthcare. This number is expected to rise because medical advancements are helping children with complex chronic conditions live longer.
Healthcare providers play an important role in identifying children with medical complexity, but it can be difficult to identify these children at the population level because there is no agreed-upon definition, there are a variety of medical conditions involved and important information is often not found in population-based data sources. While several methods have been developed to use health administrative data to identify these children, none of them have been tested in Canada.
To make healthcare programs and policies to support children with medical complexity and their families, we first need to know more about this important pediatric population in the Maritimes. One way we can do this is by using routinely collected health administrative data to find out how many children with medical complexity live in the Maritimes and how they use the health system.