A Computerized Asthma Management System in the Pediatric Emergency Department

Asthma is the leading chronic childhood disease affecting 9 million children (12.5%) under 18 years of age (1). Asthma exacerbations cause an estimated 14 million missed school days (2) and more than 1.8 million emergency department (ED) visits annually (2), and account for >60% of asthma-related costs (3). The chronic characteristic of asthma carries a considerable economic burden.

Uncontrolled asthma can lead to exacerbations requiring the patient to seek immediate care, frequently in an ED setting. Several asthma guidelines, including the nationally accepted guideline from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), exist to support clinicians in providing adequate treatment. Utilization of and adherence with asthma guidelines improves patients' clinical care (4, 5). However, guideline adherence remains suboptimal. In the ED, early recognition and accurate assessment of the severity of airway obstruction and response to therapy are fundamental to the improvement of health for patients with asthma. The NHLBI guidelines emphasize early recognition and treatment of asthma exacerbations, as well as appropriate treatment stratified by severity.

Computer applications for patient care can address barriers to optimal medical care. Computer systems have improved the use and adherence to practice guidelines, provide clinical alerts and reminders, and generate patient-specific treatment recommendations and educational material. Implementation of guideline-driven decision support is frequently paper-based or computerized. In either form a major barrier remains on the busy clinicians to remember to initiate the guideline a process and to embed the guideline tasks in the clinical workflow of the care team (5). The proposed study examines the benefits of a novel approach for reminding clinicians in an ED setting to use guideline-driven care. The approach will apply a workflow-embedded process taking advantage of an advanced information technology infrastructure. The informatics approach will include two elements: a) a computerized, real-time reminder system, which will automatically detect guideline-eligible patients without requiring additional data entry, and b) a computerized, workflow-embedded guideline implementation.

Inclusion criteria

• all patients aged 2-18 years
• Emergency Severity Index 2 to 5
• availability of completed computerized triage documentation.

Exclusion criteria

• critically ill patients (Emergency Severity Index 1)
• patients who leave-without-being seen
• patients who leave against-medical-advice
• patients whose final diagnosis was not asthma (false positive identification by the detection system) or were determined not to be eligible for the guideline.