Teen Driving Assessments
Why is this important?
Teenagers have a higher risk of motor vehicle crashes than any other age group.
The virtual driving assessment aims to prevent crashes in this vulnerable group by providing teen patients at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) with a comprehensive evaluation of real-world driving skills in a safe, controlled environment.
Our Initiative
The virtual driving assessment has been established at multiple CHOP primary care practices to provide patients with innovative technology to improve crash outcomes. The virtual driving assessment measures a person’s ability to drive safely and avoid crashes by identifying specific skill deficits. Upon completion of the virtual driving assessment, participants receive personalized feedback on their driving via an automated report, which includes actionable steps for improvement, including tips and videos to develop specific driving skills.
Our findings
The virtual driving assessment has proven to be feasible and reliable to implement in a primary care office. Most teens find the assessment easy to use and realistic, while all teens and their families feel the driving feedback is helpful and would recommend the experience to others. The virtual driving assessment is now available at different sites across the CHOP Primary Care Network.
Primary Care Wellness Report
Why is this important?
Healthcare has historically been focused on one patient at a time, making it difficult to identify the issues cutting across patient and family populations. To better understand key aspects of child health, following the Covid-19 pandemic we identified key wellness domains and metrics to analyze using clinical data from the Primary Care Network. What we found has become the basis for a Primary Care Wellness Report.
Our initiative
We use clinical data from the Primary Care Network to describe the state of family health across several domains including childhood immunizations, obesity, developmental and behavioral health, sleep, adolescent health, and well visit completion. To understand key trends we also explore data by patient demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, insurance type, age, and gender.
The data set includes 300,000 children with more than half a million visits.. Identifying the largest health concerns from this data will inform future research efforts to address health disparities.
Our findings
Identifying these wellness domains allowed us to expose health disparities that widened as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and how they continue to change over time. We delve into greater depth about this in a recent publication, COVID-19 and Changes in Child Obesity and Covid-19 and Adolescent Depression and Suicide Risk Screen Outcomes.
Sleep screener
Why is this important?
Sleep is foundational to many of the problems that are managed in a primary care setting and poor sleep impairs child functioning at all ages. In our Care Network, sleep was captured inconsistently, and sleep issues were not being sufficiently captured. In addition, parent focused sleep education was minimal and not standardized across the patient population.
Our initiative
We developed an automated, age-specific electronic screener that was available to parents to complete ahead of the visit or while in the waiting room. An automated summary of the results appear in the physician’s note and parent education is readily accessible for providers.
Our findings
Since implementation across the Care Network, over one four hundred thousand sleep screeners have been completed annually. The sleep screener has also contributed to an increase in provider awareness of sleep issues in their patient population and has helped identify patients that need additional sleep related interventions.
Adolescent Health Questionnaire
Why is this important?
Prior to the development of the adolescent health questionnaire, there was no consistent method to screen teenagers for health risks across the Care Network leading to wide variability in the data that gets collected at teen well visits. Few teens were offered a confidential visit with their pediatrician, further impacting how they respond to screenings. Prior research findings suggest that teens prefer electronic screening and that they are more likely to disclose sensitive information regarding health risks when answering an electronic questionnaire.
Our initiative
We developed an automated electronic screener for teens ages 13+ to complete during well visits. After completing the electronic questionnaire, providers can easily review the results and mark off which areas do not require further discussion or which ones require additional assessments. The results from the screeners can be viewed over time, giving providers access to a patient’s full history at their fingertips.
What we learned
The adolescent health questionnaire relieved some of the burden providers often feel during teen well visits. It also contributed to an increase in provider awareness of health teen risks. Tens of thousands of adolescent health questionnaires are completed annually.
For those interested in learning more about the adolescent health questionnaire and areas for potential collaboration, please reach out to our team.