Course Goals & Objectives
Course Goals:
The goals of this EQIPP course include:
- Become familiar with current guidelines and policies for the diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing monitoring of ADHD and related comorbid conditions.
- Identify areas of improvement needed in practice related to the diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing management of patients with ADHD.
- Recognize barriers that complicate the provision of high-quality ADHD care and identify processes/resources to overcome these barriers.
- Create plans for improvement to address gaps identified in key clinical activities related to ADHD care. (You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act [PDSA] cycles.)
Objectives:
By the end of this course, you will able to:
- Recognize the Primary Care Clinician’s (PCC) responsibility for initiating an evaluation for ADHD when the family and/or school expresses concern about their child’s behavior, or when inattention/hyperactive behaviors are identified on a valid mental health screening tool.
- Identify and use age-appropriate, DSM-based ADHD rating scales to gather information about the child or adolescent’s ADHD symptoms and impairment.
- Screen/assess for other conditions that might mimic or be comorbid with ADHD. Treat patients with comorbid conditions or refer if outside the PCC’s expertise.
- Determine the basis of the ADHD diagnosis, including that DSM-5 criteria have been met and that symptoms and impairment are evident in 2 or more major settings.
- Recognize ADHD as a chronic condition and identify the patient with ADHD as a child or youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN).
- Provide initial and ongoing ADHD education suitable for the age, health literacy, language, and culture of patient/family.
- Make guideline-based and age-appropriate treatment recommendations including: 1) Evidence-based behavioral parent training in behavior management (PTBM) and classroom behavioral/training interventions; 2) FDA-approved medication(s) for ADHD as appropriate; and 3) educational supports as appropriate.
- Recognize the PCC’s responsibility to routinely follow up with the patient/family to monitor treatment progress and titrate doses of medication and/or adjust behavioral/training interventions to achieve maximum benefit with tolerable side effects.
- Identify ADHD treatment resources within the community and beyond to which you can refer patients needing more specialized care.
- Realize the pediatric medical home’s ongoing responsibility to develop/update/maintain patients’ care plans and to coordinate care with members of the care team.
Quality Improvement:
Measure and improve care delivery and processes for key clinical activities of care by doing the following:
- Collect and analyze baseline date to establish a starting point for improvement.
- Identify 1 or more performance gaps in key clinical activities of care.
- Create an improvement plan for closing identified gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested:
- AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
- MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
- CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
- Test ideas quickly on a small scale to determine if changes lead to improvement.
- Collect and analyze 2 follow-up cycles to measure the results of the test.
- Determine how to sustain successful changes to systematically integrate them into the practice’s culture, processes, and workflow.