Course Goals

The goals of EQIPP: Growth – Addressing Concerns and Management course include:

• Acquaint you with AAP recommendations for monitoring growth and pubertal development of pediatric patients.

• Help you create plans for improvement to address gaps identified in key clinical activities related to assessing growth and pubertal development and sharing this information with patients, families, and other members of the patient’s medical care team as warranted. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

For the Generalist:

• Understand AAP recommendations for assessing, monitoring, and addressing growth and pubertal development concerns as identified in the current Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision
• Be familiar with policies that outline the responsibilities for care coordination for patients with growth or development concerns between the pediatric medical home, the primary health care team, and other providers.
• Record and evaluate growth and pubertal development measurements longitudinally to detect abnormalities.
• Develop a growth evaluation plan for your practice that establishes procedures for obtaining essential growth and development parameters and ordering appropriate laboratory tests and imaging to follow up on suspected abnormal growth or pubertal development.
• Establish procedures for referring and following up on patients with growth or development concerns and communicate with the care team to ensure optimal patient care.

For the Endocrinologist:

• Recognize when to initiate or discontinue growth hormone therapy.
• Ensure that children with growth- or pubertal-related concerns have a comprehensive, written care plan developed by the pediatric endocrinologist and shared with the primary health care provider.

Quality Improvement:

• Measure and improve care delivery and processes for key clinical activities of monitoring and managing growth and development by doing the following:
  • Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement.
    • Identify one 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 data 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.