Improved 10-year cost savings for patients served by the Boston Children's Hospital Community Asthma Initiative.

Objective: To provide a 10-year follow-up of asthma cost-savings for patients served by the Community Asthma Initiative (CAI) group compared to a coarsely cost-matched comparison group from similar neighborhoods (comparison group).

Methods: CAI provided home visits and case management services for patients identified through emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalizations. Asthma costs for the two groups were extracted from the hospital administrative database for ED visits and hospitalizations for one year before and 10 years of follow-up.

Personal Phone Calls Lead to Decreased Rates of Missed Appointments in an Adolescent/Young Adult Practice.

Introduction: Nationally, hospital practice missed appointment rates are high. Our goal was to reduce the rate of missed appointments in an Adolescent/Young Adult Practice through quality improvement methods.

Methods: During the 12-month intervention period, administrative staff called patients the day before their primary or specialty care appointments to remind them of the date, time, and location, as well as patients who did not attend their appointments to ask about the reason for their missed appointment.

Parent experiences with a nurse-supervised community health worker asthma home-visiting program.

This study seeks to identify helpful components of a nurse-supervised Community Health Worker (CHW) asthma home-visiting program, obtain feedback from parents and families about their experiences, and receive suggestions for new services that the program could provide. Likert scale ratings and semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with parents who were selected from a representative sample and previously participated in the program. Five-point Likert scale ratings from 1 (not helpful) to 5 (very helpful) were obtained for 11 program components.