AAP Releases Bright Futures Tool Kit

If pediatricians tried to cover all the recommendations for preventive care with their patients, well-child visits could go from minutes to hours.

With that in mind, the American Academy of Pediatrics is releasing a new tool kit to help physicians streamline their well-child visits without missing important screenings or glossing over the concerns of parents. The Bright Futures Tool and Resource Kit is designed to be used with “Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents,” third edition, which was released last year by the AAP, with support from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau.

“This is what's going to allow people like me—primary care pediatricians—to do what we want to do in our preventive services,” said Dr. Joseph F. Hagan Jr., a pediatrician in Burlington, Vt., and one of the editors of the Bright Futures tool kit.

The kit includes previsit questionnaires, documentation forms, patient handouts, community resources, and other practice management tools. The tool kit is available on CD-ROM through the AAP bookstore at www.aap.org/bookstore.

The introductory purchase price, which is available through the end of 2009, is $275. The price includes a license for up to three users.

The tool kit builds on the goals of the original Bright Futures guidelines, which were to acknowledge that pediatricians have a lot to cover in preventive services and not much time to do it in.

One of the tools that could go a long way to making the well-child visit more efficient is the previsit questionnaire, Dr. Hagan said.

There actually are multiple questionnaires to help pediatricians assess risk by asking parents about safety behaviors—like seat belt use—because they are customized for different age groups. They also ask parents to spell out their own concerns and goals for the visit.

“If you use the previsit questionnaires that are in the tool kit, you can let the parents start the visit without you,” Dr. Hagan said.

The documentation forms in the tool kit allow pediatricians to quickly document the screening and risk assessment done in each visit, he said.

In addition, the tool kit includes handouts for various age groups, touching on topics such as stranger anxiety, setting limits, dental health, bullying, and mental health care.

The new tools will take some time to incorporate into a pediatric practice, Dr. Hagan said, but in the long term, they should result in either time saved or time used more efficiently.

The documents in the tool kit can also help pediatricians by identifying the five priority target areas for each well-child visit.

The questionnaires and handouts in the tool kit all coincide with the priorities set for each visit.

“It would be great if we had 45 minutes to do each visit and cover more, but we want to be sure that parents come away with the optimal things for their child,” said Dr. Jack T. Swanson, a pediatrician in Ames, Iowa, and an editor of the Bright Futures tool kit.

Dr. Swanson said he and his colleagues on the tool kit team wanted to make it easier for pediatricians to put the recommendations from the Bright Futures guidelines into practice. They didn't want the guidelines to simply sit on the shelf.

One of the advantages of the Bright Futures tool kit is that it puts all of the information gathered about child and adolescent prevention in one place, said Dr. Paula Duncan of Burlington, who is chair of the Bright Futures Steering Committee and youth health director of the Vermont Child Health Improvement Program.

“We're really trying to respect the limited time that clinicians really have with patients,” she said.