EnterVue: Pediatric Computer Screening, Waiting Room Surveys, Health Risk Screening.

The most effective way to ensure the well being of your child is to identify potential health problems before they develop. This process is known as preventive care, and it can be used to both help prevent disease as well as promote your child's overall health. Every time you answer your doctor's questions about your child during checkups, you're helping your doctor practice preventive care.

EnterVue:Pediatrics is a new tool that your doctor is using to help provide the most comprehensive care for your child. It allows your doctor to expand the amount of preventive care your child receives by taking advantage of the time you spend in the waiting room. When you use EnterVue's interactive questionnaire, your doctor will spend less time asking questions and more time providing answers.

During an EnterVue session you answer simple questions pertaining to your child via an easy to use touchscreen tablet. Each session consists of a few dozen yes-or-no questions and lasts for less than five minutes. The questions are drawn from a list of hundreds of important issues, covering topics such as child development, healthy habits, and home safety. Since the needs of your child are always changing, EnterVue uses adaptive screening to ensure that the questions given will most effectively address your child's unique needs.

When you're done, the information you gave is immediately available for your doctor to use during the remainder of your visit. With a better understanding of your child's health, your doctor can increase the level of preventive care. It's that simple.

When your visit is over, your doctor can provide you with an informational sheet that follows up on the topics discussed during your EnterVue session. This sheet contains valuable information including phone numbers and web sites to help you continue to practice preventive care in your child's day-to-day life.

And the next time your child visits your doctor for a checkup, you'll have the opportunity to use EnterVue again. Only this time the adaptive screening technology will provide a new set of questions, addressing the unique needs of your child. As your child grows, EnterVue follows along, always adapting to provide your doctor with the information needed for improved preventive care.

The EnterVue concept and screening questions used in EnterVue:Pediatrics were assembled by a group of doctors from Children's Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh led by Kelly J. Kelleher, M.D., M.P.H. Their team conducted waiting room assessments with paper and pencil surveys on over 24,000 children from 402 physicians' offices in preparation for EnterVue. Patients from 44 states, Puerto Rico and Canada were included in both English and Spanish language versions of the assessments.

The content areas for questions used in EnterVue are derived from the Bright Futures program (www.brightfutures.org), a national initiative of the U.S. Maternal Child Health Bureau to improve preventive care for children and adolescents. Bright Futures has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Academy of Family Practice, among others. Specific questions for EnterVue are drawn from a number of different sources and are updated regularly to include the instruments with the best evidence available to support their use in primary care settings.

The rationale for their use is described more fully in the following articles:

Kemper KJ, Kelleher KJ. Family psychosocial screening: Instruments and techniques. Ambulatory Child Health. 1996;1:325-339.

Kemper KJ, Kelleher KJ. Rationale for family psychosocial screening. Ambulatory Child Health. 1996;1:311-324.

Murphy JM, Kelleher KJ, Pagano ME, Stulp C, Nutting PA, Jellinek MS, Gardner W, Childs G. The family APGAR and psychosocial problems in children: A report from ASPN and PROS. J of Family Prac. 1998;46(1):54-64.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Public Health and Science, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Guide to Clinical Preventive Services, Second Edition. A Report to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1996.