Transforming Pediatrics
Improving early childhood developmental care in pediatric settings helps support all families, promote healthy development, and lay the foundation for school readiness and long-term well-being.
To set babies and toddlers on a path toward lifelong health, families sometimes need access to a range of services – including developmental promotion and prevention, developmental screening, care coordination, and interventions that support well-being. Pediatric primary care offers a nearly universal and frequent touchpoint for children and families, creating an unparalleled opportunity to promote health and strengthen early childhood developmental systems of care by meeting families where they already are.
As a main objective of our national technical assistance and support, the ECDHS: Evidence to Impact Center helps advance the delivery of high-quality early childhood development promotion services in pediatric settings. This page includes resources that health care providers and early childhood professionals can use to effectively support pediatric settings to advance early childhood developmental health for the families they serve. We also include information about our work with the Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood (TPEC) program and community health centers.
Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood: Toolkit Series
Strengthen pediatric care with action-oriented toolkits designed to help teams create lasting change. This series provides strategies, examples, and resources that support pediatric practices and their partners in advancing early childhood developmental health. Each toolkit explores a key area of practice transformation.
Policy, Financing, and Payment Strategies
Discover strategies to identify, finance, and sustain services that support young children and families. This toolkit includes foundational resources explaining key concepts, practical planning tools, state examples, and guidance for communicating with decision-makers.
Coming Soon
- Family Engagement: This toolkit will highlight strategies and resources to help pediatric care teams foster authentic partnerships with families.
- Delivering a Continuum of Care: This toolkit will equip pediatric practices with resources to deliver comprehensive care across critical operational areas, such as workflows.
Additional Resources to Support Pediatric Transformation
- The Change Package for Community Health Centers: Integrating the Early Childhood Development Continuum of Care helps pediatric teams integrate developmental services, with steps that teams can test and adapt, along with customizable sample tools.
- The Early Childhood Social-Emotional Billing and Coding Guide provides guidance on social-emotional developmental screening, including billing and diagnosis codes and example case stories.
- The Getting Started Guide: Implementing a Screening Process helps pediatric care teams develop a screening workflow, with step-by-step planning considerations and implementation guidance.
Explore more resources here.
Early Childhood Development Continuum of Care
We support states and communities in building, enhancing, and sustaining continuous access to a comprehensive continuum of care for all families. This continuum includes promotion and prevention, surveillance and screening, care coordination and linkage, and early intervention.
The continuum is based on Bright Futures recommendations, which include guidance for preventive care screenings, health supervision visits, healthy eating, nutrition, screen time, and other factors that support a child’s development. The dropdowns below include key strategies for each part of the continuum that pediatric practices can use to help meet the needs of families with young children.
Key Strategies for Each Part of the Continuum
– Provide age-appropriate education during well-child visits, including information about: child development and what to expect next, social-emotional health and mental well-being, early learning and literacy, and positive parenting and strong caregiver-child relationships
– Offer prenatal visits to support families before birth
– Connect families to community resources (e.g., parent groups, libraries, child care
– Integrate early childhood development experts into routine well-child visits
– Use validated screening tools during well-child visits to check for developmental delays, autism, social-emotional concerns, perinatal depression, and social needs affecting health and development
– Encourage ongoing developmental monitoring as recommended by Bright Futures and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (additional guidance here and here).
– Refer families to needed or requested services for developmental support
– Help families navigate health and community systems
– Participate in shared referral tools, such as resource directories or coordinated intake systems
– Provide brief interventions during well-child visits
– Integrate mental health consultation during the well-child visit
– Offer issued-focused support from an early childhood development expert
– Provide consultation and training to the primary care team about treatments related to developmental concerns and infant and early childhood mental health services
Watch our webinar recording to learn more about the continuum and how it can be implemented in practice.
Technical Assistance for State and Community Teams
To advance high-quality and sustainable early childhood developmental services in pediatric settings, our Center provides technical assistance and support to 151 community health centers and eight Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood Resource Hubs. Our technical assistance includes a variety of offerings (e.g., peer-to-peer learning sessions, individual team calls, financial sustainability planning, and more), resource development and dissemination, continuous quality improvement, and impact storytelling.
Explore our interactive map to learn more about the state and community teams we work with.