About the Well Visit Planner®

Your Child, Your Well Visit
Improving Child and Family Health One Well Visit At-A-Time!

The Well Visit Planner® is a family engagement-based approach to improve the quality and positive impact of early childhood health promotion and preventive services for all children and families.

The Well Visit Planner® was designed, developed and tested with families and child health professionals between 2008-2016 by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) under the leadership of Dr. Christina Bethell. All work has been done in partnership with families, child health professionals, experts and local, state and federal child and family health leaders, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, Family Voices and top Bright Futures Guidelines experts.

The Well Visit Planner® is a part of CAHMI’s broader work to promote a Cycle of Engagement (COE) model of children’s health services to ensure the family agenda drives high quality care and that information about the whole child and family is used to address child and family social, relational and health needs and priorities in partnership with families, child health professionals and communities. The COE model and tools also include the Online Promoting Healthy Development Survey, the Personalized Connected Encounter approach to care and the CARE_PATH for Kids for children with special health care needs.

Funding for the development, validation and implementation testing of the Well Visit Planner has been supported through grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Research Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The CAHMI has self-funded much of the work to maintain the public use version of the Well Visit Planner between 2012-2020. Between 2013-2018 some support for our work was provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ National Head Start Center, the American Board of Pediatrics and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Since 2020 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has supported work to update and move both the public and original provider integrated version of Well Visit Planner into use in the field. Our goal is to transform child health systems and services in order to promote high quality health promotion and preventions services with family engagement and health equity at the center.

Share Your Experience

Your voice and experience are so important. Please share your experience with the Well Visit Planner. Tell us what you like and ways to improve!

We Need Your Help

After repeated demonstrations of positive impact and need, the CAHMI is currently working to spread the use of the Well Visit Planner for all children, families and the health professionals that support them. If you are interested in helping to make this happen, please consider donating to the CAHMI here.

Brief Summary of the Well Visit Planner®--a tool for families and child health professionals committed to the well being of children

The Well Visit Planner (WVP) is an online, mobile optimized tool that engages parents/caregivers as partners to improve well-child care for children up to 6 years of age while ensuring high quality care is provided based on Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children and Adolescents, Fourth Edition. Available in English and Spanish, the WVP helps parents/caregivers to learn about child development, reflect on their strengths, needs and priorities and plan for upcoming well visits for their child/children. Families prioritize what they want to discuss ahead of the visit while learning about and getting resources for the range of potential topics recommended to be addressed in the Bright Futures Guidelines. The personalized Well Visit Guide families receive helps focus time during encounters on the priorities and needs of the family while providing all recommended results of screening to both the family and child health professionals. The WVP is currently available for the First Week, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18-month and 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5 and 6-year well visits.

Child health professionals can customize the WVP for use with the children and families they serve and receive Clinical Summaries of the family personalized Well Visit Guide that can be used to prepare for and conduct personalized, connected encounters, document completion of screening and support chart prep and note taking.