Personal health information made accessible, complete, neutral and comprehensible

The 360°CHILDoc dashboard presents a complete picture of a child’s health situation at a glance. The tool can be accessed by healthcare professionals, parents and young people themselves. “It supports the active involvement of parents and young people in their health and facilitates shared decision-making”, explains Miriam Weijers, a public health physician/child & youth health care physician, assistant professor and researcher/PhD candidate. “The 360°CHILDoc provides a solid foundation for clinical reasoning and promotes preventive health interventions”, adds Carolien Bastiaenen, associate professor of Epidemiology.

The 360°CHILDoc (Child Health IntegraL Digital Overview) is a digital dashboard that provides insight into a child’s health and development within four domains: Body Structures and Functions (both physical and mental), Activities and Participation, Personal Factors and Environmental Factors. Miriam: “To provide quality health and preventive care, you must take a holistic view of the child. This requires you to integrate and assess information from different domains. You must also be able to share that information in an accessible way in order to actively involve parents in thinking processes and shared decision-making about health interventions. But the electronic medical dossiers we currently use are unstructured, difficult to navigate and often incomplete. Importantly, this makes it harder to see connections in the data. That’s what inspired me to think about possible improvements. Frans Feron, a child & youth health care (CYHC) physician and professor of Child and Adolescent Health, has been an important source of inspiration throughout the project. To ensure the integration of theory and practice, I involved him from the beginning. I developed a rough design and showed it to fellow CYHC physicians and nurses, parents and young people. They were extremely positive about the concept and its potential. From that moment on, I was given the opportunity to continue working on the project. I earned a master’s degree in Epidemiology to expand my knowledge on the subject. For my final project, I conducted a pilot study of the 360°CHILDoc with Carolien as my supervisor.”

Carolien: “The master’s project involved a pilot study of the reliability and validity of the rough version of the 360°CHILDoc. We investigated whether different CYHC physicians arrived at similar assessments of overall functioning based on the same profile. This was repeated three months later. Both times, the assessments were sufficiently similar. We also investigated whether the assessment of a CYHC physician who spent five minutes studying a child’s profile sufficiently corresponded with the perspective of the child’s own doctor. These results were positive, too. We felt increasingly confident that the tool could support CYHC professionals in making adequate assessments quickly and efficiently.”

Data visualisation and design

To take the development of the 360°CHILDoc to the next level, a grant was secured from the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw). The project developed into a PhD project, with Frans Feron and Carolien Bastiaenen as supervisors. Miriam: “Data visualisation is an essential part of the tool. It is important to evoke the right mood and present information in such a way that connections are easy to see and understand. At Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, we found two lecturers and a media design & technology student who were happy to collaborate with us. They set up a one-year research project to develop the design, taking into account the purpose of the tool, the correct positioning of the different areas, the colour scheme, appealing icons, fonts, etc. They conducted experimental sessions, using methods such as eye tracking, to determine how people perceived and interpreted the design.”

• Personalized Preventive Child Health Care the “360°CHILD-profile” studies (PhD thesis)

• A digital dashboard for visual representation of child health information: results of a Mixed Methods study on usability and feasibility of a new CHILD-profile. 

  Journal of Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, 7 (1), 29-44.

• A feasibility Randomised Controlled Trial as a first step towards evaluating the effectiveness of a digital health dashboard in preventive child health care: a mixed methods approach. Weijers, M., Boumans, N., van der Zwet, J. et al. Pilot Feasibility Stud 9, 25 (2023). 

• Designing a Personalized Health Dashboard: Interdisciplinary and Participatory Approach. Weijers, M., Bastiaenen, C., Feron, F. & Schröder, K., 9 Feb 2021, In: JMIR Formative Research. 5, 2, p. e24061 9 p., 24061.
• Evaluation of a New Personalized Health Dashboard in Preventive Child Health Care: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial. Weijers, M., Feron, F., van der Zwet, J. & Bastiaenen, C., 1 Mar 2021, In: JMIR Research Protocols. 10, 3, 9 p., e21942.

• The 360 CHILD-profile, a reliable and valid tool to visualize integral childinformation. Weijers - Ottenheim, M., Feron, F. & Heuts - Bastiaenen, C., 2018, In: Preventive Medicine Reports. 9, p. 29-36