One Big Doable Thing! Elevating Comprehensive Developmental Promotion and Preventive Services With the Family-Engaged Well Visit Planner Approach
This webinar highlights the Cycle of Engagement Well Visit Planner model and tools to help clinicians, family specialists, and community-based early childhood professionals engage families in comprehensive preventive and developmental services.
This webinar focuses on the family-engaged Well Visit Planner. Presenters share how to leverage existing system strengths and implement the Cycle of Engagement Well Visit Planner approach, which is designed to advance “through any door” health promotion and prevention services. Viewers will learn about child flourishing and available data to inform and spark state and local partnerships and hear about the practical application of the Well Visit Planner in a community health center setting. The learning objectives are to:
- Identify mindsets and pathways for leveraging existing early childhood systems to improve access to comprehensive health promotion and preventive services that engage families in ways that effectively promote the early relational health required to foster whole child and family flourishing.
- Learn about how the family-engaged Well Visit Planner approach addresses key requirements, including comprehensive early developmental screening aligned with Bright Futures and challenges related to assuring high-quality, personalized well-child services that put families at the center and connect the pediatric health system with the broader early childhood system.
- Explore the application of the Well Visit Planner approach through a case example in a community health center and consider how this approach helps improve access to, and the quality of, well visits during early childhood.
Key Takeaways
- Well visits are a critical opportunity for families and health providers to connect, and national Bright Futures Guidelines recommend 15 well visits in the first 5 years of life. However, there are wide and persistent gaps in the utilization and quality of services. These gaps require innovative, family-centered strategies that efficiently provide families with essential, required information and free up time to address their goals and priorities, promote early relational health, and foster the healthy development and flourishing of the whole child and family.
- Developed by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), the Well Visit Planner (WVP) approach aims to achieve One Big Doable Thing! to ensure the universal provision of Bright Futures Guidelines-aligned health promotion and preventive care with real engagement of families and enabling “through any door” collaboration across early childhood systems.
- The WVP approach features a family-facing digital tool that streamlines and integrates comprehensive screening and priority setting and helps families and health professionals focus time on the unique needs, goals, and priorities of each child and family. The WVP educates and engages families as partners while freeing up time to focus on promoting early relational health and building the trust needed to address risks and promote positive childhood experiences.
- The WVP digital tool is available in English and Spanish and covers 15 age-specific well child visits. Families can sign up for personal accounts utilizing a secure dashboard or use without an account. Free for families, the WVP takes about 10 minutes using three easy steps:
- Families learn about and complete age-specific screeners/assessments based on Bright Futures Guidelines;
- Families choose priorities from the many age-specific topics identified in Bright Futures Guidelines, and they get resources and tips on how to discuss their goals and priorities with their child’s provider; and
- Families receive an auto-generated Well Visit Guide summarizing results with a focus on their strengths, needs, and priorities and providing tips and links to resources specific to their needs and priorities.
- From a primary care clinic perspective, the WVP supports the success of other approaches like HealthySteps, Reach Out and Read, and the use of family specialists. It can be customized by each care team using the WVP online Cycle of Engagement platform.
- Using the unique URL generated, clinics invite families to complete the WVP prior to their child’s visit. The WVP can be done at home, in the waiting room, or even in the visit room on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, with or without help, as required.
- Providers use their secure data dashboard to access the auto-generated Clinical Summary based on family responses, providing an integrated “at a glance” view of screening results and family priorities. Families and providers share the same data and agenda. Aggregate data across families is also available. Clinical Summaries can be easily scanned or electronically integrated into electronic health records, and data elements can also be integrated if enabled by the clinic.
- Research and use of the WVP shows that it can support more effective team-based care around the promotion of early brain development, early relational health, building and sustaining supportive relationships with families, and meeting screening requirements, while also improving workflow efficiency, quality of care, and even reducing urgent care utilization.
- The webinar featured use of the WVP by People’s Community Clinic (PCC) in Texas. PCC uses the WVP approach to conduct child and family screenings and prepare for a family-centered well visit. Since the WVP is easy to sign up for and use, the clinic was able to adopt and implement the WVP on a compressed schedule, including the creation of a customized WVP to use with families. The clinic has found pre-visit completion of the WVP to be important for optimizing the benefits of the WVP in the primary care setting with positive feedback from families and clinical team members alike.
- The WVP can be used by any early childhood system and has been used through Head Start, in home visiting, and through community-based resource and referral programs like Help Me Grow. The WVP data-sharing platform supports data sharing across early childhood system partners. The WVP is featured as an example tool to foster integrated early childhood developmental health systems through the Engagement In Action Framework (EnAct!), which further delineates strategies, data, policies, and partnerships for success.
Cycle of Engagement Well Visit Planner Resources
- Family-Facing Overview Videos in English and Spanish
- Family-Facing Website
- Child Health Professional Overview Video
- Provider and Professional Website
- Child Health Professional Account Sign-Up Demo Video
- Clinic-Focused 2-Page Overview
- Example Family Outreach Flyer
- Summary of Content and Benefits
- Community Partner Focus Overview
- Engagement in Action (EnAct!) Framework 2-Page Summary
CAHMI’s “One Big Doable Thing!” Story: Meeting the Moment Where the Science of Healthy Development, Lived Experiences, and Practices Meet
- The Aim: child flourishing, school readiness, family resilience
- The Focus: early relational health; safe, stable relationships and environments
- The Requirement: a whole-child, whole-system approach
- The Key: family engagement in every encounter
- The Opportunity: optimize existing health promotion and prevention infrastructure through the power of well-child visits
- The Approach: a through any door Cycle of Engagement with no broken links
- The System: leverage shared accountability to drive system integration with the Well Visit Planner and the Engagement In Action Framework (EnAct!)
- Impact Pathways Where “Everyone Leads”: mindsets, partnerships, practices, and policies
Featured Speakers
Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH
Director, Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, Professor, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine
Barbara Leach
Family Support Specialist, UNC School of Social Work
Louis Appel, MD, MPH
Director of Pediatrics, People’s Community Clinic
