A new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant awarded to the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM) in Norwood will enhance collaboration between primary care providers, patients, their caregivers, and New York City schools, Montefiore Einstein officials said.

 

Building on a five-year research project that Montefiore Einstein officials said increased primary care providers’ use of national asthma management guidelines, Marina Reznik, M.D., M.S., vice chair of clinical and community-based research at CHAM, is launching a new study to more seamlessly link clinicians, caregivers, and schools so children can receive guideline-based asthma care while at school. Reznik is also professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

 

Montefiore Einstein officials said currently, for children to receive asthma medication in school, parents and providers must go through a multi-step process. They said this includes caregivers requesting their child’s primary care provider to complete a medication administration form by taking the paper form home to complete, and then bringing it to school to be kept on file by the school nurse.

 

Reznik’s prior research showed that less than one third of students have the completed documentation at school, limiting their ability to receive asthma care when they need it. “We believe children with persistent or uncontrolled asthma would benefit from collaborative support from their family, their medical team, and their school,” said Reznik.

 

“By streamlining the submission process for the medication administration paperwork and creating one system where the child’s caregiver and provider can access, complete the same documentation online, and then route it directly to the school, it will make it much easier for the child to receive asthma maintenance and rescue medications when they need them,” she added.

 

In addition to the electronic system where caregivers will be able to easily access and complete the documentation, which will then be routed to the child’s school by the New York City Department of Education, Montefiore Einstein officials said children with asthma and their families will be supported by asthma outreach workers.

 

They said these workers will liaise between families, clinical teams, and schools, and provide telephone-based care coordination to ensure that medications are accessible to students both at school and at home. They said the asthma outreach workers will also help caregivers understand how to use the medications and support families who experience barriers to care, such as filling prescriptions.

 

Montefiore Einstein officials went on to say that around 400 children aged 4 to 12 with persistent or uncontrolled asthma will be enrolled from Montefiore Medical Group clinics. They said clinicians and caregivers in half of the randomly assigned clinics will have access to the online portal to complete the documentation, so they can receive their asthma maintenance medications at school, and families will receive support from the asthma outreach workers.

 

They said the other half of the clinics and children enrolled from these clinics will receive usual care where their provider gets prompts for guideline-based care while they are at their medical appointments. At the end of the study period, they said Reznik and her team will evaluate the data from the two groups to see if the intervention helped to improve outcomes, including children’s asthma control, caregiver quality of life, and school attendance.

 

Michael D. Cabana, M.D., M.P.H., physician-in-chief at CHAM, said, “This new multi-million dollar grant is testament to the advances in asthma care that Dr. Reznik has implemented through many years of research collaboration with various community partners.” Cabana, who is also The Michael I. Cohen, M.D. university chair in the department of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, added, “We are delighted that her work can be expanded to benefit more children with asthma.”

 

The NIH grant is titled “Promoting Asthma Guidelines and Management through Technology-Based Intervention and Care Coordination in Clinics and Schools” (PRAGMATIC-S)” (1R01HL181061-01).

 

For more on the topic of tackling asthma in The Bronx, click here, here, and here.