A team of child health advocates saw a need for educational resources designed to encourage parents of children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP to find and use a medical home, and to learn about and use alternatives to the ER for treating routine childhood illness. This study seeks to penetrate what lies beneath the endless stream of children whose parents think their best health care option for a primary care treatable illness is the emergency department of a hospital.  It poses a central question: What drives the parent's health care decisions?  And finally, it investigates what parents think will help them use their health care benefits in the way the benefits were designed: to have a primary care provider and a medical home.

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• Understanding Why Parents Use the ER for Pediatric Primary Care: A Prerequisite for Change
• Emergency Department Utilization: Defining the Problem

• Parents and the ER:  Findings From In-Depth Interviews

• Findings From Healthcare Professionals
• Putting it Together: Re-Tracing the Path to the ER
• Conclusions and Recommendations

To obtain a printed version of this report, please call 512-324-1913, or contact ldolmeda@seton.org