Editorial Policy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If the editor-in-chief determines post-publication critiques or concerns to be evidence-based and add value to the content, depending on scope, the error would be changed, the authors would be given the opportunity to respond, or an update of the entire content would be undertaken.