When the Beacon Program began in 2010, ONC asked that each of us take steps to align our health IT investments with the top population health priorities for our community. Along with several other Beacon Communities, we in Southeast Minnesota selected children’s health, with a clinical focus on pediatric asthma.
We knew that health IT offers innovative ways to address the unique challenges associated with improving children’s health that would help with information sharing between parents, schools, medical, wellness and social service providers, so we developed a program that used health IT to help with that sharing. Now, as health IT tools addressing the needs of children continue to evolve, we are hopeful that our work and the work of our fellow Beacons serve as a source of inspiration and insight for other families and care providers across the country.
Our efforts in the asthma effort, and those of some of the other Beacons, are highlighted in a new issue brief by AcademyHealth titled “Spotlight on Kids: Beacon Community Efforts to Improve Pediatric Prevention, Care, and Outcomes.” This issue brief emphasizes the importance of communities working together to develop solutions for sharing and using health data to improve health care and outcomes for children.
Comprehensive care coordination and management of children who have asthma relies upon connections not only between the health care system and parents and/or caregivers, but also with schools. Through the electronic exchange of health data, communication can be improved, timely care facilitated, and the burden of children’s asthma management for schools, parents and health care systems can be reduced.
Our Beacon is one of the ONC Beacon Communities featured in the brief – we focused our efforts on the exchange of health information between the health system and school nurses. Through discussions with community and provider focus groups, we found that school nurses and health systems in our community both suffered in their ability to treat students from a lack of direct communication with one another regarding children’s asthma symptoms, even in the face of recurrent exacerbations. Due to the absence of a system for capturing parental permission to share health information, school nurses often had to spend time calling parents before treating a child with an exacerbation.
Our Approach
To address these challenges, we focused our efforts on promoting the development of Asthma Action Plans (AAPs), customized plans that describe how to control a child’s asthma and handle worsening asthma symptoms. At the same time, a team of community physicians, nurses, school nurses, public health experts, asthma experts, IT experts and a project manager worked together to develop standardized language for the AAP across health care systems, develop methods to obtain parental permission to share the AAP with schools, and develop a relatively inexpensive electronic transfer system that could be sustained with community resources.
We used a portion of our Beacon funding to develop a secure, locally hosted portal to provide the …read more
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