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Care Mapping

Caremap app

One of the greatest challenges for families is coordinating care across all members of the care team — essentially, assuring that everyone is up to date on the “what happened” and “what’s next” for their child’s care. To meet the challenge of improving care coordination for children and youth with complex needs, a multidisciplinary team from Boston Children's Hospital, Duke Health, and National Family Voices developed an application called Caremap. When Caremap is fully implemented by families and care team members, Caremap makes it possible to:

  • document a child’s medications, health problems, allergies, and hospitalizations
  • track ongoing symptoms such as sleep, bowel movements, exercise, or other behaviors deemed important by families and clinical team members
  • document and monitor progress toward a child’s health goals as prioritized by families in collaboration with the care team
  • create summaries automatically of a child’s care to share with providers

In 2020, a simulated version of Caremap was developed and tested by a multidisciplinary team from National Family Voices, Boston Children's, and Duke Health. The project was awarded first place in the Health Resources and Services Administration Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s national competition Care Coordination for Children with Special Health Care Needs Grand Challenge.

For demonstration of the potential functionality of Caremap, please check out this video:

Origin story: Caremap

Families raising children with special needs have long acted as the primary care coordinators for their children, connecting the dots between home, health care, school, and the community.

Acting as “air traffic control” between health care providers, home care workers, child and respite care, teachers, specialists, and community agencies can add considerable stress and time to parenting, cause families to miss work or work less, strain relationships, or cause needs to go unmet.

Professionals can help relieve some of this stress and help families be more effective by partnering with them to coordinate and plan care. We have developed a tool, the care map, to assist families and the professionals they partner with.

Although it was initially created for families raising children with special needs, it can also be used for anyone of any age or level of needs to make partnering with professionals more effective.

What is care mapping?

Care mapping is a process that guides and supports the ability of families and care professionals to work together to achieve the best possible health outcomes.

In its most developed form, care mapping is a family driven, person-centered process which highlights a family’s strengths and communicates both the big picture and the small details of all of the resources needed to support a child and their family.

It provides a comprehensive snapshot of a family’s needs and enables the care team to appreciate how each of these aspects relates to each other.

Guides

Care Mapping: how-to guides for families and professionals

We have created two guides for families and professionals to answer some questions we have been frequently asked about creating and using care maps.

Care Mapping research

Antonelli R and Lind C. “Care Mapping: An Innovative Tool and Process to Support Family-Centered, Comprehensive Care Coordination.” Poster session presented at the annual Primary Care Innovation Conference of the Harvard Medical School Primary Care Center, Boston, MA. October, 2012.

For further information, please contact integratedcare@childrens.harvard.edu.

For use of the Care Map image, above, or additional information, please visit https://cristinlind.com/newcaremap/.