It’s hard to believe that summer vacation is almost over. As your practice starts to ramp up with back-to-school visits, we thought it might be a good time to highlight the wide range of adolescent-focused tools available in Ocean.
Caring for – and communicating with – adolescent patients about health issues can be particularly difficult. There is strong evidence that by incorporating tablet-based or computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI) techniques into visits, clinicians can potentially uncover more concerns, encourage more honest responses, and improve the overall patient experience. Notably, CASI techniques have been shown to increase reporting of sensitive behaviours when compared to face-to-face interviewing, including reports of sexual behaviour and drug use. [1,2] Similar studies have found increased reporting of depression, irritability, and substance abuse [3,4,5,6].
Over the past few years, we have built a number of useful forms and validated tools in Ocean that are particularly helpful for patients in this age group. You can find a full listing at the bottom of this article, complete with links that allow you to preview the forms and the clinical notes they generate.
We are particularly pleased to share three new assessment forms that were recently added to the library, covering pre-adolescents to age 17. Each assessment form was inspired by the Greig Health Record (Greig et al., 2010; Greig et al., 2016), which is an evidence-based clinical tool that can be used to assess children and adolescents (Greig et al., 2016). Assessment forms include information about home life, school, friends and activities, nutrition, sleep, safety and injury prevention as well as development. Assessment forms for children over the age of 9 also include questions about substance use, mood and sexuality.
If there are other questions that you wish to include in your assessment, all of our forms can be customized to suit the needs of your practice. Moreover, using rules in Ocean, additional forms can be triggered automatically based on patient responses. For example, if an adolescent states that they feel down or depressed for most of the time, Ocean can automatically trigger the PHQ-A to be added to the queue of forms.
A listing of helpful forms and validated tools for adolescent patients follows (click on the form name to preview). If you see something missing, let us know! We’re always adding to the library and we love it when our users help us to make the library better.
References:
1. Millstein SG, Irwin CE Jr. Acceptability of computer-acquired sexual histories in adolescent girls. J Pediatr. 1983;103(5): 815–819.
2. Turner CF, Ku L, Rogers SM, Lindberg LD, Pleck JH, Sonenstein FL. Adolescent sexual behavior, drug use, and violence: increased reporting with computer survey technology. Science. 1998; 280(5365):867–873.
3. Supple AJ, Aquilino WS, Wright DL. Collecting sensitive self-re- port data with laptop computers: impact on the response tenden- cies of adolescents in a home interview. J Res Adolesc. 1999; 9(4):467–488
4. Bobula JA. Anderson LS. Riesch SK. Canty-Mitchell J. Duncan A. Kaiser-Krueger HA. Brown RL. Angresano N. Enhancing survey data collection among youth and adults: use of handheld and laptop computers. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing. 22(5):255-65, 2004 Sep-Oct.
5. Aquilino WS, Wright DL, Supple AJ. Response effects due to by-stander presence in CASI and paper-and- pencil surveys of drug use and alcohol use. Subst Use Misuse. 2000; 35(6–8):845–867.
6. Beebe TJ, Harrison PA, McRae JA, Anderson RE, Fulkerson JA. An evaluation of computer-assisted self-interviews in a school setting. Public Opin Q. 1998;62(4):623–632.
7. Greig A, Constantin E, Carsley S, Cummings C; Canadian Paediatric Society, Community, Community Paediatrics Committee. Greig Health Record – Executive summary. March 2010.
8. Greig A, Constantin E, Carsley S, Cummings C; Canadian Paediatric Society, Community, Community Paediatrics Committee. Preventive health care visits for children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 years: The Greig Health Record – Technical report. March 2010.
9. Greig A, Constantin E, LeBlanc C, Riverin B, Tak P, Li S, Cummings C; Canadian Paediatric Society, Community Paediatrics Committee. An update to the Greig Health Record: Preventive health care visits for children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 years – Executive summary. Paediatrics and Child Health 2016;21(5):265-68.
10. Greig A, Constantin E, LeBlanc C, Riverin B, Tak P, Li S, Cummings C; Canadian Paediatric Society, Community Paediatrics Committee. An update to the Greig Health Record: Preventive health care visits for children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 years – Technical report. Paediatrics and Child Health 2016;21(5):265-68.
