General pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists require frequent assessments of a patient's growth. With increased pressure from managed care organizations to evaluate more patients in less time, it has become commonplace for practitioners to forego plotting data on growth charts in the traditional manner. This trend has led to oversights of an important aspect of patients' overall health and development.
GrowthCalc (for “Growth Calculator”) is a computer application developed to allow practitioners to quickly compare a patient's height, weight, weight for height, body mass index, and body surface area against established norms. The clinician or other health care provider simply enters the patient's gender, date of birth, date of measurement, height and weight, and is quickly returned results (actual values and standard deviation scores(SDS)). If measurements on two different days are entered, GrowthCalc will also calculate height and weight velocity, again with corresponding SDS. Should the patient's bone age also be available, GrowthCalc will compute the patient's predicted height and predicted height SDS. GrowthCalc calculates all parameters by evaluating higher order polynomials derived from published normal values. Users may review the references used to obtain the polynomials at any time while using the program. In addition, growth standards for specific patient populations are being added (e.g. for Down's syndrome, Turner syndrome), and will be selectable by the user.
