Strengthening guideline use in youth health care: The JGZ RichtlijnRoute tool
Published on 09-09-2025
In youth health care (Jeugdgezondheidszorg, JGZ), professional guidelines play an important role in ensuring evidence-based and consistent care. Yet, current clinical decision support systems (CDSS) used in JGZ cover only a limited number of guidelines and are often not yet widely adopted.
To address this gap, we are developing the JGZ RichtlijnRouteTool – a digital tool that supports the development, selection, and implementation of CDSS tailored to the needs of JGZ professionals, developers, electronic health record providers, policy-makers and JGZ-organizations.
This project takes a user-centered design approach, involving end users and other stakeholders in every step of the research and development process. Through surveys and interviews with JGZ professionals, as well as focus groups with developers, EHR providers, and policy-makers, we are mapping the needs, opportunities, and barriers around effective decision support in practice.
The resulting RichtlijnRouteTool will include:
- A selection aid to compare available CDSS based on relevant criteria;
- A design module to support development or refinement of CDSS;
- An implementation guide for organizations and technology partners.
We will evaluate the tool’s usability with a diverse group of end users using the facilities of the eHealth Living & Learning Lab Amsterdam. This ensures that the tool will be feasible and in practice.
As this project is executed within the eHealth Living & Learning Lab Amsterdam, there is an educational component to it. A master student was appointed as a research assistant to help execute the project. Noortje about her experience working on this project:
“quote noortje”
By translating research into a practical, co-created solution, the RichtlijnRouteTool supports better use of CDSS for guidelines in JGZ – ultimately contributing to more effective and equitable youth health care.
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