What is an ADHD Visit and What are the Important Aspects of It?
An ADHD visit is a comprehensive appointment focused on evaluating and managing symptoms of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in patients. These visits are crucial for accurately diagnosing ADHD, monitoring treatment progress, and adjusting management plans. Key aspects of an ADHD visit include a detailed history from the child and parent about presentation, functioning, and other medical conditions; standard symptom assessment tools completed by parents, teachers, and older children; assessment of any co-existing conditions, including learning, emotions, substance use, and conduct, and discussions about treatment options, which may include accommodations at school, support for organization and homework completion, medication, sleep, nutrition and lifestyle modifications. It is also important to determine a child’s strengths to build on for self-esteem and life success.
What is Needed to Make the Visit Useful and What Prevents a Useful Visit?
For an ADHD visit to be effective, thorough assessments, patient and family involvement, accurate documentation, and regular follow-ups are essential. Guidelines are to utilize standardized tools and questionnaires to accurately evaluate symptoms and their impact on school and daily life. Engaging patients and their families in the assessment process ensures comprehensive insights, and detailed records of symptoms, treatment plans, and progress are crucial for outcomes. Regular follow-up visits, typically every three months after initial stabilization, are essential for monitoring progress, watching for emerging co-existing conditions, monitoring growth, cardiac health, and any medication side effects, and making necessary adjustments to the treatment plan. Additionally, especially when coexisting conditions are present, suggestions from other professionals such as psychologists, educational specialists, or child psychiatrists are also important to optimal planning and outcomes.
However, several factors can impede the usefulness of an ADHD visit. Incomplete assessments or missing information can make diagnosis and monitoring less accurate. In contrast, limited time during appointments can make it harder to gather an accurate picture or have genuinely shared decision-making about treatment plans.
How Will ADHD Visits and Follow-Up Visits Fit the Telehealth Model?
Telehealth is already widely used for follow-up visits for ADHD care, reducing barriers to transportation and time from school and work and allowing for the optimal number of visits. Telehealth can make ADHD care more accessible, especially for patients in remote areas. Sometimes, extra insights can be gleaned by telehealth visits from home as the context is visible, and clinicians can encounter siblings and pets. Telehealth needs to be supplemented by measurement of height, weight, pulse, and blood pressure, which may be done by school nurses, a briefer drop-in nurse visit at the office or home measurement. However, the main disadvantage of telehealth is ensuring enough privacy from siblings and one-on-one time with the child and clinician. In addition, some hyperactive children are difficult to contain in view of the camera in their familiar home environment!
How Can CHADIS Help?
CHADIS is ideally suited to enhancing the effectiveness of all ADHD visits, including telehealth visits, through several key features. It provides comprehensive screening tools that patients, families, and teachers can complete online at any time before the visit, ensuring that healthcare providers have all the needed information.
When monitoring questionnaires are completed online and educational or life-enhancing resources are delivered to portals, as done with CHADIS, visits and telehealth visits can be easily made comprehensive. Additionally, CHADIS facilitates the creation of personalized letters for 504 Plans and Individualized Education Program (IEP) requests using partially prefilled forms in CHADIS with quick text options for including recommendations that can be decided upon together with the family and delivered to the CHADIS Care Portal instantly.
Having these suggestions and/or required request forms helps schools provide the best support for students with ADHD. Tools such as the Vanderbilt Assessments, assigned, reminded, scored, and graphed automatically, display results from multiple respondents, help track medication dosages and their effectiveness, and make follow-up care more efficient and informed. CHADIS allows the scheduling administration of monitoring questionnaires, including reminders, so that more rapid adjustments of medication doses or behavioral interventions can be made to optimize progress and, ultimately, outcomes.
CHADIS patient-specific templates incorporate patient, parent, and teacher input in writing 90% of the needed visit note, whether in person or tele, saving clinicians time and often justifying higher level billing codes beyond the extra codes for billing for the standardized tools. With online consent, the new CHADIS referral functionality can assist in making referrals to other needed professionals, sharing reports and questionnaire results, and documenting shared care that qualifies for new chronic care management and care coordination billing codes.
Useful Links and Other Resources
For more information on telehealth and ADHD visits and to explore the tools and resources available through CHADIS, visit the CHADIS Telehealth ADHD Visit page. Here, you will find valuable insights and tools to enhance your practice and improve patient outcomes.
Comments