Get Help in Rhode IslandEditorial Policy
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The Medical Home Portal aims to assist families and professionals in working together to better care for children and youth with special health care needs by providing reliable and useful information about their conditions and needed care, services, and resources.
Editorial Guidelines
Authoring
Content is original, updated regularly, and written by volunteer
physician experts, staff physician authors and editors, authors with expertise
in the subject, and parent representatives contracted through Utah Family Voices. Following the ICMJE, CSE, and WAME
recommendations (detailed below in Best Practices), authors provide a biography,
full citations when needed, and disclose any conflicts of interest that may
disqualify them from authoring. Additional authoring criteria for clinical
content are below.
Acknowledgment
Author and reviewer acknowledgment, authoring history, and the
publishing date of the most recent version/update can be found at the bottom of
each page.
Editorial Process
All content is evaluated for quality, structure, readability,
appropriate language level, and conciseness. Clinical content also includes
evaluation by a physician editor and input from a peer reviewer (as described
below). A topic is published once the author(s) and editor(s) agree it is
complete. Faculty, staff, and editors can be found at About the Medical Home Portal.
Role of the Board
The editorial board helps ensure success of the Portal's mission and
advises and supports the editors of the Medical Home Portal. See
Editorial Board for members,
roles, and responsibilities.
Updating Content
Author(s) and editorial staff endeavor to perform a comprehensive
update of content every 2-3 years to ensure that it is current and maintains
relevance for children and adolescents with special health care needs. Authors,
Medical Home Portal editorial staff, state partners, and other interested
parties may initiate time-critical revisions whenever a clinically significant
development (e.g., new practice guidelines or new therapies) or an important
care topic is identified.
New Content
Suggestions for new content or revisions of existing content may be
submitted by state partners, existing or potential authors, or other interested
parties and will be evaluated by the Medical Home Portal editors and/or
editorial board. Suggestions may be submitted through the Portal’s
Feedback form.
Clinical Content Policy
Clinical content follows additional editorial policies for authoring and reviewing content. Clinical content written for the Medical Home Portal includes evidence-based medical information intended to assist the primary care clinician in caring for children and youth with special health care needs. It includes Diagnosis modules, Newborn Disorder pages, Issue pages, and For Physicians & Professionals content.
Goals for inclusion of medical content are to:
- Gradually add Diagnosis modules for the more common chronic conditions in children and adolescents and for a representative portion of the uncommon/rare conditions.
- Include a Newborn Disorder page for all conditions screened for in partner states.
- Include Issue pages with important clinical relevancy for care of children and adolescents with special health care needs and conditions with Diagnosis modules.
- Provide guidance for clinicians and their teams in implementing the medical home model of care.
New clinical content supports the above goals and is vetted by the Editor-in-Chief.
Authoring Clinical Content
Authors of clinical content must have clinical training, expertise,
and experience in the diagnosis/topic and have no substantial financial
conflicts of interest or biases against standard practice related to the
diagnoses/topics about which they write (any less substantial conflicts/biases
will be disclosed). All authors supply up-to-date supportive citations for their
content.
Authors are responsible for the accuracy and
quality of the entire module/page, though portions may be authored primarily by
contributing authors. The ICMJE authorship criteria state authorship credit
should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or
acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the
article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3) final
approval of the version to be published.
Contributing authors may be recruited by authors or
Portal editors/staff. In general, contributing authors are responsible for
focused sections related to their expertise/experience and collaborate with the
author(s) in writing their section(s). They accept responsibility for and
provide sufficient input to ensure the author(s) of the accuracy and quality of
their section(s).
Senior authors provide oversight, support, and
assistance to one or more authors, usually a trainee(s) or allied professional
(e.g., genetic counselor) writing a module/page related to their shared
expertise/experience. The senior author shares responsibility for the accuracy
and quality of the content.
Reviewing Clinical Content
Clinical content will be reviewed by at least 1 peer reviewer with
similar training, expertise, and experience. Reviewers may be suggested by the
author(s), recruited by the Portal staff, or provided by the Editorial Board. Reviewers are selected to
provide high-quality, constructive, and fair reviews.
The goal of review is to assess and provide input to the author(s) and
editor(s) on the accuracy, quality, clinical relevance, and completeness of the
content. Additional expert reviewers may be asked to provide input related to
specific aspects/sections; primary care clinicians or family members may also be
recruited to provide their perspectives.
Reviewer input will be submitted to the editor(s), who will work with
the author(s) to determine appropriate responses. Following the ICMJE, CSE, and
WAME recommendations (described in Best Practices), reviewers disclose conflicts
of interest in reviewing specific Portal pages and disqualify themselves if
necessary. Not all conflicts of interest are necessarily disqualifying, and in
some cases, the reviewer with the most expertise may also have conflicts of
interest that are disclosed.
Best Practices
Editorial procedures and policies follow industry-wide best practices. They are guided by the Editorial Board and the:
Funding
The Medical Home Portal does not host or receive funding from
advertising or the display of commercial content. Information about Medical Home
Portal funding and partners can be found at About the Medical Home Portal. Also see, Linking to Other Websites and Inclusion Policy for Service Providers for
further details.
Authors & Reviewers
Initial publication: June 2018; last update/revision: September 2021
Current Authors and Reviewers:
| Author: | Medical Home Team |
Authoring history
| 2018: first version: Chuck Norlin, MDA |
AAuthor;
CAContributing Author;
SASenior Author;
RReviewer