For discharge planners, school staff, and clinicians

What this guide is, and how to hand it to a family in thirty seconds

You already know the problem. A family leaves the hospital with a trach, a feeding pump, and a folder of discharge paperwork, and nobody has time to explain Medicaid pathways, the APD waiting list, or why they should ask for a care coordinator. Three months later they are back, exhausted, having applied for none of it.

This guide exists to be the thing you hand them. It is free, it needs no account, and it is written to be read on a phone in a parking lot.

What it covers

• Benefits and eligibility pathways — Medicaid routes, the CMS Health Plan, KidCare, SSI, and the APD iBudget waiting list, including the ICMC trade-off that permanently removes a person from the pre-enrollment list
• Daily care — what a PPEC is, how it differs from private duty nursing, and twelve questions to ask on a tour
• Therapies — school-based versus medical therapy, and the EPSDT language that belongs in every appeal
• Education — Early Steps, the transition at three, IEP versus 504, hospital-homebound, and FES-UA deadlines
• Dental, emergencies, caregiver support, and estate planning

How to use it in your work

1. Send a single tab, not the whole site. Every section has its own page and its own link — /tab/care for PPEC, /tab/estate for trusts. A family given one page reads it. A family given a website does not.
2. Print it. Each tab page has a print button that produces a clean PDF with no navigation and no ads. Put it in the discharge folder.
3. Use the checklist at intake. It lists the applications a family should have started, in the order that matters. It doubles as a fast gap assessment.
4. Point Spanish-speaking families to the Spanish version. Add /es/ to any address.

If you serve these families professionally

Two things would help, and neither costs anything.

• Tell us what's missing. If families keep asking you something this guide doesn't answer, that is the most useful message we can receive. We track every question asked of the site's search and write sections to fill the gaps.
• Tell us when we're wrong. Deadlines move, plans leave the state, thresholds change. If you spot something stale, say so and we will correct it and date the change.

Accuracy and independence

Sponsorships pay for the guide and are labelled on every unit. Sponsors get no say in what is written, no advance review, and no mentions inside the guidance. We do not sell or share reader information, and we do not collect any beyond a newsletter address given voluntarily. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes with it.

Esta sección aún no se ha traducido al español. Se muestra en inglés.