Children's Medical Services Offices

Children's Medical Services (CMS) is a statewide program with 22 field offices around the state that uses a family-centered, multidisciplinary approach to serve the health care needs of approximately 85,000 children in Florida with chronic health conditions. CMS maximizes the resources of the private health care delivery system by partnering with private health care providers using contracts for both health care services and infrastructure for program administration. The contracts for infrastructure have created a coordinated and managed health care setting to serve children with conditions that previously were not addressed in a multidisciplinary manner.

Expenditures for the delivery of health care services approximate $750,000,000 per year. With medical costs escalating in recent years, it becomes increasingly important to have a system that will hold rising costs in check as much as possible. CMS helps to slow this by careful case management, utilization of its own network of providers, and implementation of fiscal controls that are designed to avoid fraudulent or duplicate payments to providers.

CMS Field Offices With Regions

This map illustrates the cities where CMS field offices exist. Each field office serves specific counties within its region. These offices are centrally located with consideration to population centers and availability of health care practitioners/facilities capable of providing specialty health care services to children with chronic health care needs. This map also illustrates the service areas (counties) of each CMS region. CMS regions were determined by individual medical community referral practices in each area of the state.

CMS Primary Care Offices

Locations of CMS primary care contractors (almost all cases colocated with CMS offices) are shown on this map. These contractors are essentially administrative offices staffed with nurses who act as care coordinators for CMS clients. The administrative offices are the doorways to local member pediatricians, general practitioners, and family practitioners who serve as primary care physicians. These contractors are the main primary care health delivery service system partners with CMS.

CMS intends to reproduce these maps and many others to serve as management decision tools.