What's New
Announcement
Posted on 01.07.02
The NC Statewide Asthma Improvement Project
By Starr L. Nicely,
BS, Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, PhD, Carole Lannon, MD MPH, and Peter Margolis, MD,
PhD
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) CERTs investigators Drs. Carole Lannon and Peter Margolis have shown doctors in North Carolina several ways to improve their care of children with asthma.
For example, Dr. Margolis founded the Children's Primary Care Research Group (CPCRG) at UNC in 1993, and Dr. Lannon is its codirector. The goal of the CPCRG is to improve the health and development of children and adolescents. Improving health also means improving the effectiveness and accountability of care.
More recently, Drs. Margolis and Lannon helped create a new national program, the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ). Dr. Margolis is the managing director of NICHQ, and Dr. Lannon is NICHQ's liaison to the American Academy of Pediatrics. NICHQ, like CPCRG and the UNC CERTs, is dedicated to improving the quality of pediatric care.
The NC Statewide Asthma Improvement Project is a splendid example of improving care. NICHQ provides doctors with simple and easy-to-use tools to manage the care of children who have asthma. We have known what works best to treat asthma for a long time. The real trick is to get all doctors to use the tools that work. The Project is working especially hard to reach all 1457 clinics in North Carolina that care for children covered by Medicaid.
Doctors are using the tools the Project provides to improve asthma care. For example, after working with the Project, doctors are much more likely to prescribe one helpful kind of medicine, anti-inflammatory drugs, for children with persistent asthma. Another valuable tool is an easy way to help doctors measure how bad a child's asthma is. Having and using a written plan to manage asthma is another good way to make it easier for doctors, patients, and parents to keep asthma under control.
Clinics that use the tools show big improvements in the care of children with asthma. For example, the use of these tools can give each child almost 5 more days a year with no asthma symptoms, reduce the number of school days they miss, and prevent many trips to hospitals and emergency rooms. This not only is a big improvement in an asthmatic child's quality of life, it also saves millions of dollars in healthcare resources and parents' lost days at work.
Our CERTs partner, NICHQ, provides information on other asthma projects and asthma resources through their Web site.