Study: Fewer than 19% of ADHD treatment plans monitor treatment response according to guidelines

What did they find (at a recent study, pub­lished in the jour­nal Pedi­atrics, sur­vey­ing com­mu­ni­ty-based ADHD diag­noses and treatments)?

• For around 30 per­cent of chil­dren diag­nosed with ADHD, the evi­dence that DSM cri­te­ria were met was missing.
• ADHD rat­ing scales were col­lect­ed from par­ents and teach­ers for only 56 per­cent of youth with an ADHD diagnosis.

• Pedi­a­tri­cians pre­scribed ADHD med­ica­tion to rough­ly 93 per­cent of youth diag­nosed with ADHD. Doc­u­men­ta­tion that behav­ioral treat­ment was rec­om­mend­ed, how­ev­er, was present in only 13 per­cent of the charts.
• Fol­low-up con­tact (vis­it, phone call, or email) with­in 30 days of pre­scrib­ing med­ica­tion was doc­u­ment­ed in few­er than 50 per­cent of charts. Thus, for over half of youth pre­scribed med­ica­tion, there is no indi­ca­tion that any infor­ma­tion on the child’s response to med­ica­tion was obtained dur­ing the first month.
• With respect to mon­i­tor­ing treat­ment response over time, this rarely occurred. Only 11 per­cent of charts had any evi­dence of par­ent rat­ings to mon­i­tor treat­ment response and less than 8 per­cent had teacher rat­ings with­in the first year of treat­ment. In addi­tion, the aver­age time between ini­ti­at­ing med­ica­tion treat­ment and col­lect­ing par­ent or teacher rat­ings was quite long — 396 days for par­ents and 362 days for teachers.

Keep read­ing 5 Rea­sons Why Par­ents of Chil­dren With ADHD Need to Become Proac­tive and Well-Informed Advo­cates of Their Care over at The Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Learn more:

•  How to Nav­i­gate Con­ven­tion­al and Com­ple­men­tary ADHD Treat­ments for Healthy Brain Devel­op­ment. (May 2015; reg­is­tra­tion open)