Implementation of Electronic Shared Decision-Making Support for Early Intervention

Study Summary

Family-centered care is a best practice approach to delivering high quality early intervention (EI) services for children 0-3 years old with developmental needs. Yet, family engagement in designing and monitoring their child's EI service plan is suboptimal. Families need a valid, reliable, and useful tool to share in decisions about the scope of their child's EI service plan. The investigators will achieve a major advance in contributing occupational therapy expertise to improve family engagement when designing and monitoring their child's EI services. The investigators will test the use of an evidence-based electronic tool with families at one EI program, when the child is due for an annual review of progress in the program. The investigators will also gather input from families, practitioners, and program leadership to identify facilitators and barriers to its use in multiple EI programs. This project tries to test an innovation in how the investigators deliver family-centered and participation-focused care. Study results will yield evidence for the effectiveness of the electronic intervention on parent activation, EI service plan focus, EI service use quantity, parent perceptions of EI service quality, and child functioning.

Primary Outcome

Parent-reported EI quality; 20 items (7-point scale) assesses these domains of family-centered care: 1) enabling and partnership; 2) providing general and specific information; 3) coordinated and comprehensive care; and 4) respectful and supportive care.

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL Young Children's Participation and Environment Measure (YC-PEM) electronic patient-reported outcome (e-PRO)