Well Visit Planner: Provider Information

La siguiente información es específicamente para que los proveedores de salud infantil aprendan cómo personalizar el Well Visit Planner para usarlo con las familias con las que trabajan. Si usted es un proveedor de salud infantil y necesita esta información en español, por favor contáctenos enviando un correo electrónico a info@cahmi.org

How to get your customized Well Visit Planner website and secure data dashboard to use the Well Visit Planner with the children and families you serve

The Well Visit Planner® is a brief family-completed, online pre-visit planning tool carefully aligned with national Bright Futures guidelines for children from the first week of life through six years of age.

To prepare to customize your Well Visit Planner (WVP) tool, please review the Cycle of Engagement Account Registration Instructions and WVP Customization Instructions and Worksheet. See below for more information about the Well Visit Planner.

"The Well Visit Planner enriches and reinforces what we do as providers of care to our families. If you want to provide comprehensive, guideline-based care that is personalized to family needs and goals, you have to use the Well Visit Planner!” (Pediatrician)

“It is a spectacular tool. Being able to have all the conditions, concerns, past visits in the same place facilitates visits. It would be my go-to to save all the information relevant to the health of my children. " (Parent)

What is the Well Visit Planner®?

The Well Visit Planner was developed between 2008-2012 and has been evaluated for feasibility, impact and acceptability by providers and families, including a randomized trial study conducted between 2013-2016. The Well Visit Planner is based on the CAHMI’s Cycle of Engagement (COE) model of care. The COE model supports the full engagement of families and communities in optimizing the healthy development of children and families while ensuring Bright Futures Guidelines are achieved for each age-specific well visit. The Well Visit Planner is currently available for each of the 15 well visits recommended to occur between a child’s first week through their sixth year of life.

The evidence-based Well Visit Planner (WVP) is:

A family-completed online, mobile-optimized pre-visit planning tool covering all 15 well visits recommended to occur between the first week and six years of a child’s life.
Specifically aligned with national Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children and Adolescents for each visit, the WVP supports a comprehensive, personalized approach to well child visits and can be used to document completion of required screenings.
Available in English and Spanish, takes about 10 minutes and is easy for families to use at home, in the waiting room, with family resource specialists and even during a well-visit.
Comes with an optional quality of care assessment tool, the Online Promoting Healthy Development Survey, a validated, family-reported quality of care tool yielding a comprehensive report on quality of care that can be used to document and improve services.

What do families and providers get?

Upon completing the WVP, families receive a Well Visit Guide based on their responses. Using a strengths-based approach, the Well Visit Guide provides additional resources to help families learn and ensure that their child’s care addresses their priorities and goals.
Child health professionals receive an at-a-glance Clinical Summary summarizing family priorities, child and family strengths, needs and concerns and health history, including results from validated screeners of children’s development and health needs, caregiver depression and family social and relational health.
The Clinical Summary also reports on additional assessments we make available for you to add to the core Well Visit Planner content.

Research shows that using the WVP improves care quality, saves time, and reduces urgent care. Recent studies show that 100% of providers were more or much more satisfied using the WVP. Most importantly, the Well Visit Planner enables you to personalize well visits while providing comprehensive care all while making time to connect and build trust with families to address their unique needs and priorities.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Get a Cycle of Engagement account, customize the Well Visit Planner (WVP) family website and get your own WVP Use Portal. You can access Clinical Summaries and family Well Visit Guides using the data dashboard you receive. Families use your customized WVP unique URL link or QR code to access your customized WVP website.

GET IMMEDIATE BENEFITS
You can use your “at-a-glance” Clinical Summary to prepare for, personalize and improve well-visit care and both document and secure payment for screening and quality care! The WVP is tested, flexible, guideline-based and personalized for each family. Add your own assessments and resources to core WVP content as you like.

Why was the Well Visit Planner created?

The need and opportunity to optimize the healthy development of all children is clear. Dramatic inequities in child health persist and large gaps in possibilities for well-being exist for all groups of children and families. The pediatric well-visit is a high leverage context to help close the gap today!
Between the first week of life and the age of six, 15 well-visits aligned with national Bright Future guidelines are recommended. Nearly all US children have insurance or other coverage for these services, with additional payments available in many states for developmental, caregiver mental health and social and relational determinants of health also covered by the Well Visit Planner.
Yet, nearly half of recommended well-visits do not occur for US children. Even when well-visits do occur, there are large gaps in quality of care measured in terms of meeting caregiver priorities and conducting and following up on findings from screenings for child development and family and child social and relational health risks.
Families often report lacking knowledge about the purpose and value of their child well-visits.
Providers often scramble to provide quality care, knowing they are missing important assessments about the child and family and are often too hurried to connect with and provide important counseling and warm handoffs to concrete supports children and families need.
Too often results of assessments are not even discussed with families and the time and trust to help families get the supports they need simply do not exist.
Collecting data from families during visits detracts from the precious time needed to build trust and link families to supports.

Families report lacking knowledge about the purpose and potential value of their child’s well-visits. Even when screenings take place, results are often not discussed and there is no follow-up.

Nearly two-thirds of US children under age 3 do not receive recommended developmental screening.

Across US states about 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 US children age 0-5 have mothers who are in less than optimal mental health. Learn More

The Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative developed the Cycle of Engagement model and evidence-based Well Visit Planner online tool to address these problems and optimize the pediatric well-visit for all children and families today.

Studies over the past 10 years have shown that the WVP saves visit time, personalizes care and gives both families and providers the confidence that they did not miss key screenings and their priorities for care and counseling were met. Providers using the WVP report greater satisfaction with care and 92% of families have reported they would recommend it to other families.

Learn more about how to customize the Well Visit Planner family website here.

“The Well Visit Planner helped organize the visit. It also helped to direct the visit to what the parents wanted to discuss and then helped to streamline the developmental piece as required for the visit.” (Pediatrician)

More About the Well Visit Planner

The Well Visit Planner (WVP) is a family-completed online, mobile-optimized pre-visit planning tool covering all 15 well visits recommended to occur between the first week and six years of a child’s life. Specifically aligned with national Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children and Adolescents for each visit, the WVP supports a comprehensive approach to well-child visits. The WVP provides families with a Well Visit Guide and provides child health professionals with an at-a-glance Clinical Summary reporting on family priorities, child and family strengths, needs and concerns and health history, including results from validated screeners of children’s development and health needs, caregiver depression and family social and relational health. Available in English and Spanish, the WVP takes about 10 minutes and is easy for families to use at home, in the waiting room, with family resource specialists and even during a well visit. Research shows that using the WVP improves care quality and enables you to personalize well visits while making time to connect and build trust with families and address their unique needs and priorities. When you customize the WVP, you can.

The WVP was initially developed in 2008-2012 through a grant from the federal Health Services and Resources Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau. We used mixed-methods, grounded theory and practice-based research methods involving families, pediatric providers, measurement, data and IT experts and worked in close collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), family organizations, and policymakers. The WVP has been validated through a randomized controlled trial (2013-2016) and continues to be studied on an ongoing basis. When you use the WVP you partner to help us improve it to meet your needs.

The WVP is available for all of the 15 recommended visits in the first six years of a child’s life (first week, and the 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 30-month and the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6-year well visits) and is designed to be customized and used by pediatricians and other child health-serving professionals. It is mobile-optimized, easy to use, and available in English and Spanish.

What topics are addressed in the Well Visit Planner and the automatically generated family Well Visit Guide and provider Clinical Summary?

The Well Visit Planner® is a brief family-completed, pre-visit planning tool carefully aligned with national Bright Futures guidelines for children from the first week of life through six years of age. Each of the 15 WVP tools (in English and Spanish), include age-appropriate topics and content as outlined below:

Twelve categories of content are included in the Well Visit Planner tools and are specific to each of the 15 well-visits across a child’s first week to sixth year of life. The Well Visit Guides families receive have been carefully crafted with families to be strengths-based and family-centered.

Child and parent/caregiver strengths (what is going well!)
Open-ended questions about family/parent specific goals and concerns for the well-visit
Developmental surveillance and standardized developmental screening using the Survey of Well-Being of Young Children (SWYC)
Autism spectrum disorder screening using the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, Revised (M-CHAT-R™) for 18-and 24-month visits
Caregiver concerns about speaking, vision, hearing
Open-ended question on any additional concerns about child’s development or health
Caregiver depression using the Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) or Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) (based on child’s age)
Family psychosocial issues (e.g., meeting basic needs, alcohol and substance use, smoking, emotional support, parent/caregiver coping, experiences of racial discrimination, etc.)
Intimate partner violence using the Women Abuse Screening Tool-Short (WAST-Short)
Anticipatory guidance and parental education prioritization checklists and provision of family-centered topic by topic Family Resource Sheets with information about each topic, example questions to ask providers and resources for more information and support. Families can add their own topics. Average number of topics selected by families is 3 from among the numerous topics recommended in Bright Futures Guidelines by age. Guidelines anchored to meeting family priorities
Other important general health information recommended to be assessed in guidelines (all age-specific): Includes topics such as nutrition, medications, vitamins/herbs, having a special health care need, positive and/or negative impacts of the pandemic, interest in telehealth visits, insurance status, family health history and updates (heart, stroke, blood pressure, new problems, recent changes or stressors)
Other context and environmental assessments (e.g., living situation, lead, fluoride)

Can I add additional assessments and topics or local resources to share with families in their Well Visit Guide?

Yes! In addition to the core WVP content aligned with Bright Futures Guidelines, you may select among other validated and non-proprietary assessments we have created or have an agreement to include in the WVP. We can add and report results from to families (in their Well Visit Guide) and to your (in the at-a-glance Clinical Summary uploaded to your WVP data dashboard). You pick which age visits for which you wish additional content to be included. You can also add links to resources for all children or by a child’s age that will be shared with families in a highlighted section from you in their Well Visit Guides (e.g., a list of local resources to get support for social needs, office guidelines related to health equity, etc.)

Below are examples of additional assessments we can add for you to your core Well Visit Planner. We can add more as requested. You can also add links to additional assessments for inclusion in the family’s Well Visit Guide.

Child Flourishing Index (CFI) – short set of items resulting in an overall resilience score
Family Resilience Index (FRI) – short set of items resulting in an overall family resilience score
Parent-Child Emotional Connection Items – short set of items reflective of best practice observational tests of child-parent attachment
Protective Family Routines and Habits (PFRH) – short set of topics resulting in a score
Pediatric ACEs and Related Life-events Screener (PEARLS) – reported as a total score or items (if family agrees)
M-CHAT – You can choose to add for other ages other than the 18 and 24 month visits which already include the M-CHAT
Additional social determinants, positive childhood experiences, child social – emotional development and pre-school/school readiness topics

Get Started Here

NOTE: All data collected is secured using the highest data security standards and with full HIPAA compliance. See our Use Agreement and Privacy Notice for more.

About the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative

The Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) is a national non-profit initiative founded in 1996 to promote the early and lifelong health of children, youth and families using family-centered health and health care quality data and improvement tools and research. Visit www.cahmi.org for more information.

The WVP was developed and is maintained by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI). Since 2008 its development and research was led by Dr. Christina Bethell. During 2013-2016 Dr. Bethell collaborated with Dr. Tumaini Coker who tested the WVP in the context of a randomized clinical trial and series of qualitative focus groups. All studies reported positive and consistent results. From 2008-2016 work was supported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Research Program. The initial design and development of the website was guided by an active group of national stakeholders and expert advisors and local family and provider partners in the health systems and communities in which the Well Visit Planner was designed and tested. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is now supporting the CAHMI to continue to improve and make the Well Visit Planner widely available and scale the use of this valuable resource to promote health equity and improve the well-being of children and families.

“It’s nice that I can have a feel for what their real concerns are before I walk in the door because it helps me plan the visit….” (Pediatrician)

“I would use and recommend the WVP because it is a tool that would help me keep a chronological record of my child's health. [Also] Keep a record of the child's strengths and needs and thus be able to maintain clear and precise communication with doctors and specialists." (Caregiver/Parent)