Background Identifying children with adverse childhood experiences is challenging but critically important, because early intervention has the potential to improve health across the lifespan. This study tests the feasibility of using an integrated state agency administrative database to identify childrens' social complexity risk factors and examine their relationship to emergency department usage.

What This Study Found State administrative data can be used to identify social risk factors for children. Researchers linked administrative data for more than 500,000 children receiving Washington State Medicaid insurance coverage with parent data to identify social complexity risk factors (individual, family, or community characteristics that can affect health outcomes), such as poverty and parent mental illness. They found that social complexity risk factors frequently co-occurred, with approximately one-half the study population having two or more risk factors. Of 11 identifiable risk factors, nine were associated with a higher rate of emergency department utilization. The magnitude of the association with the rate of emergency department utilization was small for individual risk factors, but the rate increased as the number of risk factors increased independent of medical complexity.

[For more on this story by Kimberly C. Arthur, go to http://www.annfammed.org/content/16/1/62/suppl/DC2]