CORPORATE RESOURCES / Behavioral Health Business: Moving from Costly Reactive Care to Responsive Family-Centered Care for Behavioral Health
Why Pediatric Care Has to Be Built With Caregivers
August 31, 2026 I By Taylor Beery, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Imagine Pediatrics I As originally published in KevinMD
Somewhere tonight, a parent is managing a feeding tube and watching a monitor, deciding whether a small change in their child’s breathing is the start of something serious. Families of children with special health care needs do this around the clock. They run what amounts to an intensive care unit at home, handling medications and equipment that would test a trained nurse. They do it because they want their child safe at home, not in a hospital.
I co-founded a pediatric medical group built for these families, but I also belong to one of these families. When my son was sick, his mother and I knew something was wrong before anyone could diagnose him. We weren’t evaluating test results. We were evaluating him. That understanding, from the parent who sees the shift first, is the most underused clinical resource in pediatric care, with parent-reported wellness being the strongest independent predictor of clinical severity.
Parents Know Their Child Before the System Does
One in five children in the United States, nearly 14.5 million, has special health care needs, and together they account for half of all pediatric health care spending. No two children are alike for long. The same child moves between stable stretches and sudden setbacks, and two children with the same diagnosis can have completely different needs.
Children with special health care needs can deteriorate quietly, and faster than a device or scheduled visit can catch. The first sign is usually something only a parent notices, a slight change in color or less energy than yesterday.
However, a worried parent who insists something is wrong might be considered anxious rather than informed. My own family learned this firsthand. My son was treated for a routine stomach illness while we kept asking questions, certain there was more to the story, and weeks later a scan found a brain tumor. The clinicians were capable and well-meaning, but the system around them wasn’t built to listen to us. We didn’t know medicine, but we knew our son.
Trust Comes First
Clinicians often assume they already have a family’s trust. In most cases, they don’t. By the time a new team arrives, the parent or caregiver has talked to dozens of experts and has been let down by the healthcare system. They’ve heard the confident plan before and watched it turn into one more referral or a dead end to a resource. Even the best medical advice goes unused until the family trusts the person giving it.
During the care journey with my son, a service coordinator once offered to help us get a therapy tricycle at home so our son could keep relearning to walk. Month after month she said she was on it. Eventually she admitted she couldn’t deliver, and that was the end of it. The tricycle was never really about the tricycle. It was the test of whether she would do what she said she would do. Solve the small thing a family actually cares about, and you earn the trust to help with the big things.
As professionals and providers, we earn trust by building pediatric care models with families rather than for them, and building those care models alongside their current community of care. We earn it by lifting the coordination burden off parents instead of adding to it, and by treating the caregiver’s well-being as part of the clinical picture. A caregiver who is exhausted and unsupported can’t keep a child stable at home, so their health is central to the child’s. In one study, children whose caregiver wasn’t at the bedside were several times more likely to be readmitted within a week and to experience an adverse event. Those absences fell hardest on lower-income and Medicaid families kept away by the cost of missing work or travel.
The Model That Makes It Possible
Fee-for-service pays for visits and procedures, not for prevention. Value-based care changes that. When a health plan and a care team share accountability for a child’s outcomes and a family’s experience, not just the total cost of care, the team finally has room for the preventive work that children with special health care needs require. For the most vulnerable children, these models work.
But can personalized care reach thousands of children? It can. A child moves between stable stretches and high-risk periods, and a move or a trip to the emergency room can change things overnight. With good data and steady relationships, a care team can see the risks and step in when it matters, putting the most intensive support where it’s needed.
What Family-Centered Care Means Now
For years, family-centered care has meant being kind to parents and keeping them informed. That matters, but for children with special health care needs, it isn’t enough. These families need a model that gives them a seat at the table and a clinician who knows their child and answers when they call.
For health plan and health system leaders who want to build a family-centered care model, start with the most vulnerable children, under value-based arrangements designed for them. One virtual wraparound model showed a 35 percent reduction in hospitalizations and a 44 percent reduction in emergency visits for children with medical complexity within two years, with 90 percent parent satisfaction.
But none of it works without earning the caregiver’s trust first and designing care with them. The parent who sees their child at 2 a.m. is still the most important member of the care team. Build the system around that, and you get what every one of these families is really after: more safe days at home.
# # #
About the Author
Taylor Beery is co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Imagine Pediatrics, where he leads commercial strategy and innovation for a care model purpose-built for children with special health care needs. The parent of a son, Walker, who lived with medulloblastoma, he co-founded the nonprofit Kids Join the Fight to help cure pediatric brain cancer, and Imagine Pediatrics carries Walker’s memory forward in its mission to give children more time at home. Beery holds a degree in economics from the University of Virginia and lives in Nashville with his family.