Understanding Primary Care Providers' Information Gathering Strategies in the Care of Children and Youth with Special Health Care Needs.

Effective care coordination of children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) is critical but challenging. To investigate clinicians' information-gathering strategies while preparing for visits with CYSHCN. Critical incident interviews with primary care physicians and care coordinators. Six themes emerged indicating 1) substantial reliance on the electronic health record; 2) a central role of the problem list in organizing and summarizing information; 3) Medical Home's central role in organizing clinical documentation; 4) universal need to integrate information from external records; 5) lack of well-organized and labeled encounter documentation; and 6) lack of tools reconcile medication lists. Our findings have important implications to the design of informatics tools to support information-gathering in the care of CYSHCN.