The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Receives Grant to Study Tailoring Pediatric Preventive Care to Indivi...( PHILADELPHIA Aug. 11 -- The Chil...),Health

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia will receive a $247,000 grant from The Commonwealth Fund to support research to test a new method of identifying children at risk for developmental delays and to recommend new programs for preventive care.

The study, called "Tailoring Pediatric Preventive Care to Individual Needs, Phase 2: Validating a New Instrument" will be a part of the Fund's program on Child Development and Preventive Care. Researchers at Children's Hospital will test whether a series of questions helps pediatricians identify children at risk for developmental delays. The researchers plan to use their results to help design service packages to meet the specific needs of children at different risk levels.

"Those children with more challenging problems could benefit from more frequent visits to their doctor, but we don't yet know how to identify those children," said project director Susmita Pati, M.D., M.P.H. "Right now it is a one-size-fits-all approach to pediatric primary care and there is no program for differential insurance reimbursement."

This study may help families with greater needs gain access to more frequent and longer visits with their pediatrician, more help on parenting, frequent interaction with the support staff, and home visits by a nurse or case worker, Pati said.

An earlier Commonwealth Fund project entitled "Tiered Health Supervision," developed the brief set of about a dozen questions to allow doctors to obtain information on individual children and prescribe targeted preventive services. With this second grant, Children's Hospital researchers plan to test the effectiveness of that questionnaire for 2,100 children up to age three. The resulting risk scores will be compared against results of developmental screening and health care utilization data collected by a separate Centers for Disease Control study.

Other Children's Hospital researchers i
'/>"/>