UnitedHealthcare Funds Pediatric SCD Behavioral Care, Education

UnitedHealthcare is offering $169,500 to fund efforts to provide sickle cell disease care to children and the community, the payer announced.

The payer determined that the funds would go to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, specifically, the medical center’s Center for the Advancement of Youth and the department of pediatrics’ division of hematology. The University of Mississippi Medical Center is the state of Mississippi’s only academic health science center.

“Providing equitable access to care and health education resources to Mississippians is a core part of the UnitedHealthcare mission,” said J. Michael Parnell, chief executive officer of the UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Mississippi. 

“The University of Mississippi Medical Center has the clinical knowledge to address some of our state’s biggest needs and we are honored to help bring this knowledge to high-risk and high-need communities.”

UnitedHealthcare will give $84,000 to the Center for the Advancement of Youth (CAY). The center will use these funds to offer pediatric behavioral healthcare resources. In particular, CAY will establish a pilot program that will provide data about the efficacy of the Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) program.

“The goal of our CAY-ECHO program is to increase behavioral health and psychiatric care availability in rural areas by sharing our knowledge with providers in the region,” said Dr. Courtney Walker, assistant professor of child development at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

The remaining $85,500 will go to the department of pediatrics’ division of hematology, which studies blood and blood disorders such as sickle cell disease. The department will use these funds to improve rural healthcare treatment of sickle cell disease as well as to bolster patient education about the condition.

“What is so exciting about this program is that, instead of just seeing patients, I get to teach family medicine residents how to care for people with sickle cell disease so they can do this throughout the region for many years to come. The impact is exponential,” said Dr. Melissa McNaull, professor of hematology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Sickle cell disease is most prominent among individuals whose ancestors originated from sub-Saharan Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Central America, Saudi Arabia, India, and certain Mediterranean countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Sickle cell disease impacts around 100,000 American, the CDC site estimated. The official number of sickle cell disease patients is not known.

Medicaid spending on sickle cell disease and patient outcomes point to gaps in health equity.

Apart from sickle cell disease patients, behavioral healthcare resources are of growing importance as the nation faces a rise in youth mental health crisis.