Integrating Young Adults into Adult Health Care
For use by Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Med-Peds Clinicians
Integration into Adult Practice
Integration into adult practice is the fourth element in the Six Core Elements of Health Care Transition™ (HCT). This includes planning with the pediatric clinician for the young adult’s transfer and ensuring receipt of current medical information. Adult practices should receive the young adult's transfer package from the pediatric practice and communicate with the pediatric provider about their residual responsibility for care until the first visit to the adult provider is completed. The adult practice should make a pre-visit contact (call, email, text) to welcome the new young adult, remind them of their upcoming appointment, and identify any special needs or preferences.
Implementation
Read more information on the QI framework and methods in our Quality Improvement Primer.
Implementation: Integration into Adult Practice
For each core element, we have created an implementation guide to assist you in establishing a structured transition approach in your practice/clinic/health system. It offers quality improvement (QI) guidance on what information and processes should be considered when undertaking each core element, with examples from different care settings or patient populations.
Before starting, we recommend you read How to Implement the Six Core Element of Health Care Transition, which provides a set of practical start-up steps and tips to guide your health care transition approach. In addition, if you have more questions about the QI aspects of this implementation guide, there are links within it to a Quality Improvement Primer that offers further explanations for common examples of QI tools.