Do Patient Centered Medical Home Mandates Help or Hinder Childhood Obesity

In West Virginia, the Rainelle Medical Center (RMC) is being recertified as a patient-centered medical home (PCMH). The PCMH mandates included the Health Information Technology Act Meaningful Use Measures. To meet PCMH mandates and improve children's health, the RMC is looking to develop a Healthcare Professional Pediatric Obesity Educational Program that promotes pediatric patient counseling and tracking of patient body mass index (BMI) and obesity counseling in electronic medical record (EMR). The theoretical model that was used to guide the development of this project was Roger's diffusion of innovation theory. The purpose of this DNP project is to design and validate a RMC Healthcare Professional Pediatric Obesity Educational Program for future implementation. After completion of educational program by way of a power point presentation, it was validated by presentation to 10 local healthcare experts with expertise in this area of pediatric obesity. Each expert was asked to review the educational module. A 10-question Likert-type scale questionnaire was given to each expert to complete post module review. Data were analyzed using descriptive analysis. The experts strongly agreed that content, information, and presentation was appropriate within in the module. They all agreed that the examples used in the module were appropriate. After the validation evaluation results were reviewed, changes were made based on comments from the validation to include in-depth methods for counseling obese pediatric patients. A future pilot implementation project will be planned to compare this validated program to standard education in RMC. Social change will occur with demonstrating the efficacy of the validated program by addressing the obesity issue by improving patient outcomes.