Why is this important?

COVID-19 will have lasting effects on child health and wellness. To better understand what aspects of child health have been most profoundly impacted, we identified key wellness domains and metrics to analyze using clinical data from the Primary Care Network. What we found has become the basis for a Primary Care Wellness Report. 

Our initiative

We used clinical data from the Primary Care Network to describe the state of family health across several domains including childhood immunizations, obesity, developmental and behavioral health, sleep, adolescent health, and well visit completion. To identify which groups were especially affected by the pandemic we also explored data by patient demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, insurance type, age, and gender.

The data set included 300,000 children with more than half a million visits. Analyzing this data allows us to better understand how specific groups have been impacted by the pandemic. Identifying the largest health concerns from this data will inform future research efforts to address health disparities.

What we learned

Identifying these wellness domains allowed us to expose health disparities that widened as a result of the pandemic. We delve into greater depth about this in a recent publication, COVID-19 and Changes in Child Obesity and Covid-19 and Adolescent Depression and Suicide Risk Screen Outcomes.

The next phase of implementation for the wellness report is to develop wellness profiles at the Practice level.