THE AVAILABILITY OF pediatric subspe-cialty care is critically important to the health and well-being of infants, children, and adolescents. Moreover, timely collaboration with pediatric subspecialists is an essential element of the standard of care for children: the community-based medical home. The medical home model of care, with a generalist physician as the leader, has been shown to produce considerable economic1 and patient-level benefits.23 In this model, primary care practice teams coordinate all care for a patient, including subspe-cialty care. Unfortunately, lack of access to pediatric subspecialty care within the medical home has reached crisis proportions in the United States owing to several interrelated factors: an insufficient number of pediatric subspecialists, dramatically increasing demand for pediatric subspecialty care, a fragmented system of pediatric primary and specialty care, and inadequate financing of medical education and collaborative primary and specialty pediatric care through the medical home.
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