Our Journey with Autism

The Emily Center at Phoenix Children's Hospital presents Our Journey™ with Autism as a tool to help families of children diagnosed with autism identify what they need to know. Parts of this app may also be applied to a clinic or emergency room visit.

When a child is first diagnosed with autism, parents can be overwhelmed by nurses and doctors speaking medical jargon. Sometimes health care providers think they are clearly communicating, but don’t check to make sure you understand their instructions or the available resources. If you are able to teach back the information in your own words, you can be confident you understand.

The Our Journey™ with Autism app is designed to:

• Be used from the time of diagnosis throughout the child’s journey with autism, to facilitate conversations between families and the health care team.
• Help parents identify what they need to know once their child is diagnosed.
• Give parents a safe way to admit what they don’t know or understand, and ask questions.
• Cue families on what they need to teach back to or demonstrate to their health care team. This gives the health care providers an opportunity to confirm information and skills and correct misunderstandings. -Help families feel confident that they can safely care for their child at home, know the signs of possible problems, know how to respond, and who to contact.

About the Emily Center at Phoenix Children's Hospital:

Founded in 1990, the Center is named after Emily Anderson. Emily fought a rare form of leukemia for four years before losing her battle a few days before her seventh birthday. Frustrated by the lack of easy to understand information about Emily’s illness, her parents founded The Emily Center so that families of sick children would always have access to pediatric health information that is accurate, easy to understand, and free of charge to Arizona’s families.

http://www.emilycenter.org and on Twitter @emilycenter

The Our Journey™ with Autism mobile app has been funded by a grant from Cox.