UVA earns national award for video detailing efforts to improve quality of care for children with asthma

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

The foundation selected UVA as one of four winners of its "Voices of Quality" video contest, which highlights how hospitals and healthcare providers use performance data to improve quality.

Providing Quality Care at the Hospital and at Home
The award-winning video highlights UVA's efforts to provide better care for children with asthma when they are hospitalized at UVA Children's Hospital as well as at home, said Tracey Hoke, MD, Chief of Quality and Performance Improvement.

In 2011, an interdisciplinary UVA team - including nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists and performance improvement experts - redesigned the care toolkit for asthmatic children and brought it into EpicCare, UVA's electronic medical record system. The standard of care for patients admitted 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 UVA Children's Hospital received all of the treatments and the home care plan outlined in the toolkit.

Lessons on Improving Quality
The "Voices of Quality" video contest is part of an RWJF series that aims to show hospitals and healthcare workers best practices for using performance data to improve quality. The full series, including winning videos, can be seen on the RWJF website. UVA's video can also be seen on the UVA Health System YouTube site.

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