Digital Growth Charts for Children and Families
A look ahead to the launch of digital growth charts developed by the RCPCH to support the drive to digitise healthcare.
For decades, growth charts have been important aspects of early years development and monitoring. In 2020, RCPCH announced plans to launch an online digital growth assessment tool for parents.
The new tool will help parents/carers record and understand information about their child’s growth securely online on their mobile device, and provide accurately calculated centiles for height, weight, head circumference. It will also support the drive to digitise healthcare and provide children with a digital element of their personal child health record that they can build on throughout their lives.
The development team – Dr Marcus Baw, GP and Software Developer, and Dr Simon Chapman, Paediatrician, King’s College Hospital NHS FT and South London and the Maudsley Hospitals NHS FT – recently hosted a webinar to share information on the RCPCH Digital Growth Charts API (application programming interface).
In the webinar, the team explain how the API was developed and how it switches the paper charts into a digital format, enabling developers of electronic patient records to build apps and interfaces that will give clinicians solid data to improve care, and parents online access to their child’s growth records. Watch a recording of the webinar below:
More information about the digital growth charts can be found on the team’s development portal for APIs.
If you have any questions about the project, please contact growth.digital@rcpch.ac.uk.