About the Online PHDS

The Online Promoting Healthy Development Survey (Online PHDS) is an online tool for parents to complete to assess whether young children (ages 3 - 72 months) receive well-child care as recommended in the Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents—Fourth Edition.

The PHDS was designed and developed by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) as a useful tool to educate families and measure and improve the quality of care provided to children. It asks parents/caregivers directly about their experiences with their child’s health care and providers. The PHDS has been used since 1998 by health care systems and provider care teams. Parents/caregivers across the United States have completed the PHDS to learn about and partner to improve the quality of well child care provided to their young children.

How does the Online PHDS work?

• Parents/caregivers can go to www.onlinephds.org to complete the PHDS and get a personalized feedback report with tips and resources to get the best care possible for their child and family.
• Parent/caregivers may also be invited to complete the PHDS by their child’s health care provider or health plan using a tailored URL. Completing a tailored PHDS helps assess the quality of care specific to these providers or health plans.
• Parents/caregivers complete the Online PHDS tool anonymously. They decide who else to share their personalized feedback report with.
• Providers or health plans that ask parent/caregivers to complete the PHDS will get an aggregate quality of care and improvement report based on multiple parents’ responses.
• These reports were designed to help the providers and/or health plans understand the quality of care provided and identify areas that need improvement.

How the Online PHDS works

How does the Online PHDS help children and families?

• The Online PHDS is an engagement tool for parents/caregivers to learn about what to expect during visits with their child’s providers and assess the current quality of services they receive.
• The Online PHDS gives parents an opportunity to provide anonymous feedback to their child’s providers. This helps providers assess if and how they are meeting the parents’ needs and priorities.
• The personalized Family Feedback Report parents/caregivers receive highlights areas where their needs were or were not met on recommended well child preventive care topics, and educational resources that can help them remember questions they might want to ask at their child’s next well visit.
• The parent feedback report can help parents to partner with their child’s health care providers to improve the quality of health care for their children.

What information would parents provide to get started with the Online PHDS?

You will be asked to provide your child's date of birth and time since your last visit to your child’s provider. The Online PHDS is tailored to the age of your child, so the dates you provide will be used to determine which age-specific visit applies to your child. You will also be asked to choose the state where your child receives well-child care.

What topics are included in the Online PHDS?

The Online PHDS contains questions covering the following ELEVEN topics:

1. Meeting family priorities for anticipatory guidance and education.
2. Family- Centered Care: To what extent providers practiced family-centered care, such as by listening and spending enough time with the family, meeting the family’s needs for information, partnering with the family in their child’s care, and respecting their culture and values.
3. Developmental Surveillance: Whether providers asked about the family’s concerns related to child’s development and behavior.
4. Standardized Development Screening: Whether providers conducted standardized development and behavioral screening at recommended ages.
5. Follow Up for Development Risk: Whether children with developmental risks received any type of follow up for these issues.
6. Psychosocial Assessment: Whether providers assessed home safety and psychosocial concerns such as presence of support system and family stressors.
7. Parent/Caregiver Mental Health: Whether parents/caregivers were asked about their mental health and emotions.
8. Addressing Concerns about Child Development: Whether providers addressed and provided needed information/resources about parent/caregiver concerns about their child’s development.
9. Community Factors and Resources: To what extent providers discussed available community resources and any community issues that may impact child health and development.
10. Personal Doctor or Nurse: Whether the family considers their child to have a personal doctor or nurse who knows the child well and is familiar with the child’s health history.
11. Access to and coordination of care: Family access to and use of services in the last year, including types of visits, frequency of visits and receiving needed coordination of care

How will the information collected by the Online PHDS be used?

• The information gathered on the website is confidential and anonymous.
• We do not save any information that can be used to identify you or your child, and we do not share your individual information with your provider.
• Parents/caregivers who complete the Online PHDS receive a personalized Family Feedback Report based on their responses. This report helps guide them about the steps they can take to partner with their child’s healthcare providers to improve their child’s health care.
• Providers, practices, and organizations who have an account with the Online PHDS can generate a summary report of multiple parents’/caregivers’ responses, specific to their practice or organization. This report guides providers in how they can improve the care for young children. Providers will not know what the parent’s/caregivers’ individual answers are or be able to identify who completed the Online PHDS.
• The CAHMI team can use the combined findings from the Online PHDS to describe the current level of care that is provided to young children and to conduct data analysis for purposes of research and education. No data will be sold or used outside of educational and research purposes.

You can learn more about data collection and storage by reading the Online PHDS Use Agreement and Privacy Notice.

Who developed and maintains this website?

This website was developed and is maintained by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI). The development and maintenance of the Online PHDS has been supported by The Commonwealth Fund, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB), the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP), and the CAHMI internal fund, with advisory support from many national experts, pediatricians, family leaders and health systems.

About the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative

The Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) is a national non-profit initiative dedicated to developing and supporting patient-centered methods for assessing and improving health care quality. The CAHMI has a number of activities dedicated to improving the quality of health and health care for children and young adults. Visit www.cahmi.org for more information.

If you wish to get more information about the Online PHDS, you can go over the Online PHDS Frequently Asked Questions

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