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This CHCS funded project provided New Mexico with an opportunity to reexamine the status of its school-based health care system and address the financing, quality, and future viability of these programs. As this report details, the "Salud! Comes to Your School" pilot project presented a unique set of opportunities and challenges.

In summary, these included:

• Determining what services would be covered, how they would be delivered (prior authorization was ultimately eliminated), and how covered services would be reimbursed.
• Preparing SBHCs to meet the MCOs' credentialing and quality improvement requirements.
• Developing practice guidelines for disease management, prevention, care coordination, and communication, to ensure access to and provision of quality care.
• Integrating primary and behavioral health care, both at the SBHCs and between the SBHCs and community primary care providers.
• Focusing on the total needs of the children and adolescents served.
• Making changes to the SBHCs' and MCOs' systems to ensure confidentiality for the provision of services to which adolescents can consent on their own.
  

The project's evaluation shows a number of critical successes, particularly in the project's primary goal areas to explore best practices for collaboration, increase access to care, increase the provision of comprehensive and preventive services, and integrate primary and behavioral health care.

Specific project successes include:

• As Medicaid managed care network providers, SBHCs are learning to communicate more effectively with students' primary care providers, MCO case managers, and other community resources to ensure care for students who need additional support.
• The pilot sites have made policy changes to implement the project's clinical practice guidelines; integrate behavioral health and primary care; and improve their communication, charting and billing practices. These changes apply to every student who enters the centers for care, regardless of their payer source.
  
• The MCOs have increased their Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Testing (EPSDT) data collection efforts, initiated mailings of provider relations outreach materials, and extended some primary care services to SBHC providers.
  
• The project has been recognized as a leading role model for delivering EPSDT screens to adolescents by converting sports physicals to include all of the components of a wellness check.
  
• The pilot sites have made tremendous gains due, not only to increased revenue, infrastructure, and resources, but also to a profound sophistication in billing and service delivery that allows them to actively participate in New Mexico's health care network.
  
• Support for the project is clear and momentum for SBHCs is building.
  
• The institutional reluctance felt when the project began has been progressively transformed into enthusiasm for SBHCs as an innovative way to bring inclusive health care to New Mexico's children and adolescents.