Posted on | December 10, 2010 | Comments Off
A study of cases involving children in Hawaiʻi, conducted by the John A. Burns School of Medicine, has found that regularly scheduled checkups can reduce the odds that children will end up in the hospital. The checkups, called well-child care visits, have been recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1967.
Pediatrician Jeffrey Tom of Kaiser Permanente has published the results of a study conducted with his JABSOM colleagues, Associate Professor Chien-Wen Tseng and Senior Epidemiologist James Davis. The physicians analyzed the billing data of nearly 37,000 local children younger than 3 ½ over a period of seven years, from 1999-2006.
“We wanted to establish, for the first time, evidence that taking your child to regular well-child care visits can decrease hospitalizations above and beyond seeing the same healthcare provider,” says Tom, who began the study while a research fellow in the medical school’s pediatrics department. “We found the most dramatic affect for children who have chronic diseases, such as asthma. In those cases, timely well-child care visits reduced by half the chance of hospitalization.”
The results are published in November’s Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.