Alabama Chapter - AAP

Linda Lee has served since 2007 as Executive Director of the Alabama Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), where she oversees administration of the 700-member state society of pediatricians. During her tenure, she has grown the Chapter’s capacity to meet pediatric goals in numerous child health priority areas. As part of her role, Linda serves on numerous task forces, coalitions and committees including the Help Me Grow Alabama leadership team. We asked Linda to share a little with us about the work she has done and how AAP’s goals overlap with Help Me Grow.

Linda Lee, Executive Director
Alabama Chapter - American Academy of Pediatrics

Since 2007, in conjunction with Alabama’s Blueprint for Zero to Five initiative, the Chapter has co-led efforts to increase the percentage of children who receive standardized developmental screening in the medical home. We started this with the Alabama Assuring Better Child Health and Development (ABCD) project, which developed pilots in pediatric practices to train pediatricians on how to implement and score the Ages and Stages Questionnaire and refer for appropriate follow-up. In partnership with Alabama Medicaid Agency and ALL Kids, one of our goals was to establish state policy for third-party payment for standardized screening in the medical home. These efforts paid off, as Medicaid, ALL Kids, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama have all developed policy around and now pay pediatricians and family physicians for developmental screening (limited). 

Since the ABCD pilots, AAP’s strong alliance with partners at Alabama Department of Public Health, Alabama Partnership for Children, and Alabama Department of Mental Health has happily evolved to the Help Me Grow model, a natural step for this work. We have been pleased to join forces with the United Way of Central Alabama/Success By 6 in expanding standardized screening further in a five-county area in Central Alabama. HMG & AAP trains pediatricians on use of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, coupled with the important benefit of having a connection to community resources via the HMG call center. We are excited about this partnership and the work that UWCA has done to make this a reality. In addition, this initiative has married AAP’s early literacy program, Reach Out and Read-Alabama, with HMG by connecting practices in the five-county area with new books for children from six months to five years of age. We owe a lot to the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham for its support of HMG-Central Alabama.

Linda can be reached at 334-954-2543 or llee@alaap.org.