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Stephen Porter, MD, MPH, and Eugenia Chan, MD, MPH |
Properly treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) requires consistent monitoring of a child's symptoms, medications, behaviors and side effects. Paper-based questionnaires from the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality—namely, the Vanderbilt Assessment, a method to establish the frequency of symptoms and diagnose—have been proposed for use in primary care, with parents as the logical choice to manage this task.
"But this can present challenges, since sometimes these forms gets filled out, sometimes not," says Stephen Porter, MD, MPH, a specialist in pediatric emergency medicine and medical informatics at Children's Hospital Boston. "There's very little systematic data collection going on that can be used to help doctors gauge a drug's effectiveness in ADHD. Physicians solicit bigger, gestalt opinions from parents—like whether a drug is working or—but don't necessarily drill down to what types of behavior it's working for and why."
Since this pen-and-paper process has been inefficient at capturing information necessary for the routine, systematic monitoring of children with ADHD, Dr. Porter decided to make use of computer technology and the Internet. He collaborated with William Gribbons, PhD, a professor at Bentley College in Waltham, to design a Web-based data entry tool for parents to regularly update doctors about their child's ADHD. // cont
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