01Continuity is not the same as coordination
Coordination is getting several providers to talk to each other about a case at a point in time. Continuity is something a child experiences across years: the same understanding of who they are and how they've changed, carried forward regardless of who is currently in the room.
A family can have well-coordinated care and no continuity at all, if every handover resets the record to zero.
02Development is measured in trajectories
For most of medicine, a snapshot is diagnostically useful. In neurodevelopment it is much weaker. What matters is the shape of change over time, and whether a child's trajectory is bending in response to what's being done for them.
A single assessment cannot show that. Two assessments taken years apart by different providers, scored differently and stored separately, cannot show it either. Trajectory requires consistent measurement held in one continuous record.
03Designing for the handover
Because families do change providers, move cities and age out of services, we treat the handover as the design problem rather than the exception. The record is the thing that persists; the providers around it are expected to change.
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