Health System’s Video Highlighting Asthma Care Improvements Wins National Award

The University of Virginia Health System has earned a national award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a video detailing efforts to improve the quality of care for children with asthma.

The foundation selected U.Va. as one of four winners of its “Voices of Quality” video contest, which highlights how hospitals and health care providers use performance data to improve quality.

The award-winning video highlights U.Va.’s efforts to provide better care for children with asthma when they are hospitalized at U.Va. Children’s Hospital as well as at home, said Dr. Tracey Hoke, the Health System’s chief of quality and performance improvement.

In 2011, an interdisciplinary U.Va. team – including nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists and performance improvement experts – redesigned the care toolkit for asthmatic children and brought it into EpicCare, U.Va.’s electronic medical record system. The standard of care for patients admitted to the hospital when their asthma symptoms flare up includes reliever medication that quickly address a patient’s symptoms, steroids to address inflammation and a home management care plan customized for each patient.

The standard care process appears in EpicCare as a checklist to ensure each step is completed before a patient is discharged from the hospital.

“We added some specific elements to be certain that we applied the exact care to each patient every time and gave our families something to take home … to provide the best care at home and to know which [asthma] triggers to pay attention to,” Hoke said.

Within nine months, 100 percent of children with asthma admitted to U.Va. Children’s Hospital received all of the treatments and the home care plan outlined in the toolkit.

The “Voices of Quality” video contest is part of an Robert Wood Johnson Foundation series that aims to show hospitals and health care workers best practices for using performance data to improve quality. The full series, including winning videos, can be seen on the foundation website. U.Va.’s video can also be seen on the U.Va. Health System YouTube site.

U.Va. Health System will join the three other winners of the contest to discuss their work on a national webinar on Jan. 13 from 2 to 3 p.m. Visit the event registration site for additional information.

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