Pediatrics: Growth Charts

Healthie's platform makes it easy to work with families and children.

Healthie has the CDC (2-20 years) & WHO (0 - 2 years) pediatric growth charts that you can use within Metrics. This enables you to visually track height and weight growth percentiles over time.

Enable Pediatric Growth Charts

Growth charts can be enabled for a specific client, group of clients, or for all your clients by default.

To enable growth charts for a specific client account:

Go to your client's profile > Actions tab > Settings
Scroll to the Metrics section
In the provider column, enabled growth charts by selecting Height Growth Chart, Weight Growth Chart, and/or BMI Growth Chart
Click Save to update client settings

Growth charts can be either viewable, or not viewable, to clients. To make the growth charts visible to your client, be sure to check the corresponding boxes in the client column.

To enable growth charts for a group of clients, or for all your clients by default, you can do so by adjusting the settings for these levels. Learn how here.

Information Needed for Growth Charts

Every time a height or weight is added to a client's profile, the growth chart will automatically update to reflect the new growth. By default, growth charts will not appear in the client's metrics until a height and weight have been added for the client. You'll also need to make sure there is a date of birth and gender on file, for the growth charts to render properly.

Gender & Age

Before you can use the growth charts, you need to ensure there is a date of birth and gender added to the child's client profile.

Client Profile > Actions > Client Info
In the Personal Information section, add a date of birth and make a gender selection

Height & Weight

You'll also need a valid height and weight documented in order for growth charts to render in the client's profile.

Go to the Metrics section of a client's account
Click the height option to add a height. You may need to adjust your height from inches to feet + inches
Click Create Entry at the top-right to add a new weight

Automatically Collect Client Information

While you can manually document the information mentioned in the section above, Healthie also makes it easy to collect this information during client onboarding. You can do so by adding Smart Fields to your intake forms, for parents/guardians/minors to complete.

Smart fields can also be added to charting templates, which will allow you to document relevant information (ie. height, weight) during a session, and it will automatically populate both the client's profile, and update the growth charts.

The Smart Fields you'll want to add to forms and/or charting templates can be found in the Client Info section of the Form Builder and include:

Height
Weight
Gender
Date of Birth

Best Practices for Using Growth Charts in Healthie

1. Adjust the date-range when viewing metrics/growth charts

By default, you client's account will likely only show metrics from the past week or month. When viewing growth charts, you may want to adjust this view to ALL TIME or a custom date range.

You can make this change in date range by clicking the Change Date button

Select your date range. By default, Healthie will remember this selection the next time you return to this client's metrics, and you can always adjust the date range again.

2. When logging a weight, make sure you have the correct date selected

If you need to update a metric log, simply click the data point on the weight graph (you may need to adjust the date-range if you don't see your data point), click [...] on the entry, and edit.

Interpreting Growth Charts in Healthie

As with the CDC & WHO Growth Charts, in Healthie, you'll see the percentiles (ie. 10th, 25th, 75th, 90th) charted as individual line graphs.

The data points you added (ie. weight) will be plotted in their own RED line graph. Hover over the data point to see details.

The top of the chart will also give you the most up-to-date information based on the latest data points added (ie. Client is in the X percentile)

Weight Growth Chart

Weight will be on the Y axis (pounds), and Age (2-20 years) on the X axis

Height Growth Chart

Height will be on the Y axis (inches), and Age (2-20 years) on the X axis

BMI Growth Chart

BMI will be on the Y axis, and Age (0-20 years) on the X axis

Additional Notes

At this time, a height entry cannot be added for a past date. Our team is planning an update that will support this ability.
Growth charts cannot be exported or printed at this time.
A parent can view a growth chart if they log into the child's Healthie account, and go to metrics (as long as the provider has enabled Client Can View.. in the client's settings). See section above on enabling growth charts for client accounts for more information.
At this time, we cannot change the default colors of the percentile lines in the growth charts. It's on our roadmap to help improve legibility of these graphs.

Have feedback? We'd love to hear it. You can send an email to hello@gethealthie.com.