How a primary care quality improvement initiative is implementing the expert recommendations on childhood obesity.

This article briefly describes the Expert Committee Recommendations Regarding the Prevention, Assessment, and Treatment of Child and Adolescent Overweight and Obesity and explains how the Delaware Primary Care Initiative on Childhood Overweight, a quality improvement initiative, trains primary care practices to implement them. It includes a Delaware pediatrician's first-hand description of how she incorporates the recommendations into her daily practice using motivational interviewing and the 5-2-1-Almost None healthy lifestyle message.

Use of an electronic medical record system to support primary care recommendations to prevent, identify, and manage childhood obesity.

Many primary care physicians are not providing care that is consistent with recommendations to prevent, to identify, and to manage childhood obesity. This report presents modifications made to the electronic medical record system of a large pediatric health care system, using a quality improvement approach, to support these recommendations and office system changes. Although it is possible to make practice changes secondary to electronic medical record system enhancements, challenges to development and implementation exist.