Well Visit Planner®: Creating a Cycle of Family Engagement Using the Well-Visit Planner Approach to Care
The Well Visit Planner® (WVP) digital tool and approach to engaging families in personalized well-child care services builds the capacity of families, communities, and child health primary care, family, and community teams to partner in the joyful work of promoting the healthy development and flourishing of children. Aligned with national Bright Futures Guidelines, the WVP is currently available for each of the first 15 well visits recommended for children from the first week of life through age six. Feasible for use by clinicians, family specialists, and other child and family care team members, the WVP gives voice to families to help care teams to:
- Engage families to learn about well child visits, complete assessments, and identify goals.
- Integrate and streamline family-reported, age-specific screening and priority setting.
- Use and share at-a-glance summaries with families and across child health teams.
- Prepare and optimize time during visits to focus on child and family needs and goals.
- Access tailored resources specific to the needs and priorities of each child and family.
- Partner with families to build trust and effectively promote early relational health.
- Access aggregate data to track population-level priorities, needs, and goals.
See more details below, including links to additional information about the WVP.
How the Well Visit Planner® (WVP) Works
The WVP, currently available in English and Spanish, is a family-facing digital tool parents and caregivers can use for free. It provides both families and their child’s health care, family, and community partners with a Well Visit Guide that reports on and provides resources related to each child and family’s strengths, risks, needs, and education and counseling priorities. For use on their own or with a family support professional before or during well-child visits (and other encounters), families take about 10 minutes to complete all recommended age-specific developmental and family assessments and learn about and identify family goals and priorities for education and counseling for each well-child visit. With the WVP, both families and child health professionals can rest assured that all child and family health assessments and all educational topics included are fully aligned with national Bright Future Guidelines for each of 15 well visits from birth to age 6.
The WVP was specifically designed for use by child health care providers and other child health professionals who can easily get a customized WVP to use with their families. Providers can either send families a link to complete the WVP before visits or partner with families in-person to use the WVP during visits or in the waiting room. Even if a child’s health care provider is not signed up to use the WVP with their families, families can still easily get an account to initiate a new WVP for their child, track visits, store and access Well Visit Guides and resources at any time, and keep all information for their children across well visits in one place. Using their smartphone, computer, or tablet, families can log in to their account and use the WVP at any time, which enables families to learn about and get information to take charge of their child’s and family’s health and health care. Families can also proactively share their Well Visit Guide with others they trust and reach out for support on their own using the information and resources they receive.
Completing the WVP is simple but will be new for most families and requires meaningful engagement from care teams to partner with the families they serve. First, families access the public WVP website or their child’s provider’s customized WVP website using a unique link or ID code. Families complete three easy steps on their own or with support:
- Step 1. Reflect and Assess: Reflect on what is going well for their child and as a parent or caregiver and identify goals, strengths, and concerns. Assess their child’s development and the family’s unique needs using Bright Futures-aligned screeners.
- Step 2. Prioritize: In alignment with Bright Futures, learn about and pick their priorities for what they would like to discuss across all recommended topics specific to their child’s age and/or add their own topics. Families can also access, save, or share family resource sheets for each education topic.
- Step 3. Partner: Partner with their child’s provider(s) and care team using the family’s automatically generated and downloadable Well Visit Guide so time during visits focus on connecting with providers to address their goals, concerns, needs, and priorities.
Visit the WVP public use family website and watch a short family video (available in English or Spanish) to learn more. Access the Cycle of Engagement website to learn how to sign up and customize the use of the WVP with families.
Well Visit Planner® (WVP) Information for Child Health Professionals and Community Partners
Child health care providers and other early childhood family and community professionals (e.g., home visitors, family specialists, community health workers) need resources to help effectively engage families, efficiently conduct comprehensive child and family assessments, and use time with families to focus health promotion and prevention services on the unique needs, strengths, and priorities of each child and family. To achieve these goals, child health professionals can customize the WVP for use with families. They can access their secure data dashboard for real-time access to the at-a-glance Clinical Summaries and family Well Visit Guides that are automatically generated after each family use of the WVP. Child health professionals have the option to share data across care team members who agree to collaborate and work together with families to support the health and well-being of the whole child and family. There are also options to add additional assessments, local resources, and family materials and to obtain and integrate the Clinical Summaries and WVP data into electronic records.
View this short video to learn more about using the WVP with the families you serve.
The WVP was developed and tested starting in 2008 through grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration and in close collaboration with pediatric health care professionals and families, as well as with the American Academy of Pediatrics Bright Futures Guidelines team and other early childhood systems partners, like Head Start and Help Me Grow. Any early childhood system partner, including Head Start and other early care and education professionals, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and early intervention professionals, or any family or community resource organizations can take the lead to customize the WVP to use with the children and families they serve and link families to other early childhood system partners using the WVP’s Through Any Door approach (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Using the Well Visit Planner to Support a Through Any Door Approach
The WVP was specifically designed to help care teams get the whole child and family information they need while saving time during visits to effectively promote early relational health and address social needs critical to the healthy development of all infants and young children. By anchoring visits to what families feel safe sharing and the priorities they identify, the WVP fosters the trust and partnership needed to effectively educate and support families in their capacity to foster early relational health and get help with any social needs they may have.
Download this two-page summary for more information. Professionals and care teams can also request a short demo of the WVP system and highlighted features.
Additional Well Visit Planner® (WVP) Resources for Families
The WVP is a public tool for families to access at any time. Family Resource Sheets for each Bright Futures education and counseling topic are readily available on a family educational webpage accessible on the WVP website. These resource sheets were designed with families to summarize why each topic is important and include example questions to ask their child’s providers and links to free resources. Resource Sheets are available by age and by topic, including:
- By Age: 1 week; 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 months; and 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years
- By Topic: child development, substance use and your family, child’s safety, building and maintaining healthy relationships, child’s health and growth, and prioritizing your well-being as a caregiver
Download this family-friendly handout for more information about the WVP.
What Families Like About Using the Well Visit Planner®
- Saves time filling out forms during visits and organizes all screeners and topics in one place.
- Gives families a personalized Well Visit Guide with results specific to their child and family.
- Provides easy-to-read resources on their needs and priorities.
- Helps them and their child’s providers focus care on their goals and needs and build trust.
- Builds confidence that their child’s care meets expert guidelines.
- Families choose what sections to complete and share and online completion drops stigma.
More About the Evidence-Based Well Visit Planner® (WVP) and Cycle of Engagement
The WVP was designed, developed, and tested with families and child health professionals between 2008-2016 by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) under the leadership of Dr. Christina Bethell. All work has been done in partnership with families, child health professionals, experts, and local, state, and federal child and family health leaders, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, Family Voices, and top Bright Futures Guidelines experts. The WVP has received national recognition as a valuable tool to catalyze systems change approaches and improve quality and performance across partners, including from the Health Resources and Services Administration, Administration for Children & Families, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Center for Health Care Strategies, and the Department of Education, among others.
The WVP is a part of CAHMI’s broader work to promote a Cycle of Engagement (COE) model and an integrated early childhood health systems (Engagement In Action Framework – EnAct!). The COE can be advanced with or without the WVP as long as resources support the full engagement of families, communities, and systems in optimizing the healthy development and flourishing of all children and families.
Learn more about the COE model with this two-pager and the Engagement In Action Framework with this two-pager.
Learn more about the WVP with this video:
Well Visit Planner® Family Website
wellvisitplanner.org
Well Visit Planner® Sign-Up Portal for Child Health Providers and Professionals
implement.cycleofengagement.org
