American Academy of Pediatrics Provides Guidance on Electronic Health Record Technology With Policy Statement, Technical Report

Certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology is used by an estimated 96% of U.S. acute care hospitals and 94% of office-based physicians, but gaps continue to exist in many systems with regard to core pediatric functionalities. The American Academy of Pediatrics discusses these gaps and opportunities to address them with a policy statement, “Integrating Web Services/Applications to Improve Pediatric Functionalities in Electronic Health Records,” published in the July 2021 Pediatrics (published online June 28). A technical report, “Web Services and Cloud Computing in Pediatric Care,” will be published in the same issue and online. The policy statement reviews how web applications and web services can be integrated into EHRs to meet pediatric needs, such as assessing anticipatory and preventive care gaps including immunizations, calculating pediatric blood pressure percentiles, safely prescribing pediatric medication with weight-based dosing, plotting growth curves, or providing bilirubin management clinical decision support. The statement and technical report, written by the AAP Council on Clinical Information Technology, note that pediatric providers should work with their vendor users’ groups to become familiar with available web services and web applications as potential solutions to improve pediatric functionalities. The AAP recommends that pediatricians learn about these tools and talk with vendors on ways to implement solutions where useful and feasible.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics is an organization of 67,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults.