The YAHCS provides a feasible, reliable, and valid method for assessing adherence to adolescent preventive services guidelines. It differentiates among varied aspects of preventive care provided to adolescents and is promising as a potential measure of health plan and provider quality. Improved performance on the YAHCS would indicate progress toward the achievement of Healthy People 2010 goals.
The PHDS provides a comprehensive, psychometrically valid and reliable assessment of how well health plans and the health care providers working within these plans promote the healthy development of young children. The PHDS seems to differentiate among health care plans and among the different aspects of preventive care provided within a health plan. For the population studied here, there is significant room for improvement in ensuring families and children receive appropriate and family-centered care to promote the healthy development of children between 3 and 48 months old. Because the PHDS is conceptually based on national recommendations for child health supervision, improved performance on the PHDS would indicate greater adherence to these national recommendations and progress toward the achievement of Healthy People 2010 goals. The generalizability of the findings presented in this report are being examined using data collected in 5 statewide Medicaid samples (N = 11 696) and data from the National Survey of Early Childhood Health, which has incorporated most of the PHDS items.
The Promoting Healthy Development Survey is a parent survey that assesses whether young children age 0-3 (under 48 months of age) receive nationally recommended preventive and developmental services. This survey-based tool captures information about the provision of preventive and developmental services recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau's Bright Futures. Specifically, the survey assesses recommendations provided in the context of discussions between parents and their children's pediatric clinicians. The PHDS also collects descriptive information about child health, parent health, and family behaviors. The PHDS was designed to measure these communication-dependent aspects of care because studies have shown that medical chart reviews and claims or billing data do not reliably or validly measure clinical recommendations that providers discuss with their patients. A second goal of the PHDS is not only to assess whether recommended care was provided, but also to measure the degree to which the parent have their informational needs met and whether the care provided is family-centered. Again, these important characteristics of a high-quality health system are best measured by asking the parent(s) directly. This manual provides the implementation guidelines for administration of the PHDS by mail. There are two versions of the PHDS that can be administered by mail: • The full-length PHDS (Appendix 3) • The reduced-item version of the PHDS, named the Pro-PHDS. There are three agespecific versions of the ProPHDS (Appendices 4-6). The PHDS tools are summarized in the "Fast Facts" table that follows.
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