EHR, CDS can help improve childhood obesity treatment

EHR data can be for childhood obesity interventions, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

The study sought to determine how much clinical decision support (CDS) for pediatricians helped to improve body mass index (BMI) and care quality for obese children.

"Despite the availability of obesity management guidelines, interventions to improve BMI in children have not proved effective in the context of primary care, and pediatric clinicians have been slow to adopt recommended screening and management practices," the authors wrote.

Reliable clinical information systems could improve obesity management. "The use of electronic health records offers the potential for improving the quality of care for obese children and for accelerating the use of evidence on obesity screening and management by primary care clinicians," according to the study.

Elsie Taveras, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, and colleagues tested child obesity interventions in a randomized three-arm clinical trial of 549 obese children aged 6-12 from 14 primary care practices. The patients were enrolled and tracked from October 2011 to June 2012.

One arm alerted clinicians to children with high BMIs and provided links to obesity screening guidelines, growth charts and information on weight management programs. Another provided this same level of support as well as a health coach to work with the patients' families by phone, text message and email. The third arm gave standards level of care with no CDS tools for treating obesity.

Those in the second arm experienced the greatest reductions in BMI. "We found that an intervention that leveraged efficient health information technology to provide CDS for pediatric clinicians and that provided an intervention for self-guided behavior change by families resulted in improvements in the children's BMI," the authors wrote.