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.
Resources to Transform Pediatric Care
This resource, designed for all pediatric providers, provides guidance on how to screen for social-emotional development, as well as when and how to screen for perinatal depression, developmental delays, autism, and social or emotional concerns. It also includes recommended billing and diagnosis codes for pediatric providers, along with example case stories that show how to code for social-emotional development during a well-child visit.
This guide is a fillable worksheet to help pediatric care teams develop a screening workflow. It includes step-by-step planning considerations and questions, implementation guidance, and links to additional resources. We recommend that the full care team – including clinicians, nurses, office staff, family leaders, and others – is included when completing the guide to ensure the process is best tailored to practice and family needs.
Access additional resources to transform pediatric care here.
Early Childhood Development (ECD) Continuum of Care
We support states and communities in building, enhancing, and sustaining continuous access to a comprehensive ECD continuum of care for all families. This continuum includes promotion and prevention, surveillance and screening, care coordination and linkage, and early intervention services.
The continuum is based on the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Bright Futures recommendations, which includes 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 AAP, 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
In support of our objective to advance high-quality and sustainable early childhood developmental services in pediatric settings, the ECDHS: Evidence to Impact 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 continuum of offerings (such as 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.
