Recommending Content of Well-Child Care: Testing a New Approach to Evaluating Evidence, Phase 3

Award Amount: $121,737
Approval Date: July 15, 2008
Start Date: July 15, 2008
End Date: July 14, 2009
Boston Medical Center
850 Harrison Avenue, 5th Floor
Boston, Massachusetts 02118-2393
Principal Investigator: Robert D. Sege, M.D., Ph.D.

Over the past two years, the Fund has led a funding partnership to build support among child health researchers for a new process of determining whether adequate evidence exists to make recommendations for the content of preventive care. The current "gold standard" requires evidence from randomized controlled trials; however, this does not make use of the wide variety of available evidence, leaving practitioners without authoritative guidance for much of what they do during well-child care visits. Researchers have made significant progress in reaching agreement on the need to create and apply new standards and on the key concepts underlying them. This project will extend that work by testing a new decision-making process to analyze results from two successful, developmentally focused intervention programs and develop recommendations for practice based on them.