Promoting best-care practices in childhood asthma: quality improvement in community health centers.

Objective: Outpatient asthma management remains suboptimal. We previously reported significant improvements in asthma guideline adherence and outcomes in children by using quality-improvement processes and community health workers. We hypothesized that a larger project could achieve comparable outcome improvements with streamlined quality-improvement processes and decreased technical assistance.

Improving asthma-related health outcomes among low-income, multiethnic, school-aged children: results of a demonstration project that combined continuous quality improvement and community health worker strategies.

Objective: The purpose of this work was to improve asthma-related health outcomes in an ethnically and geographically disparate population of economically disadvantaged school-aged children by using a team-based approach using continuous quality improvement and community health workers.

Patients And Methods: A demonstration project was conducted with 7 community clinics treating approximately 3000 children with asthma 5 to 18 years of age. The overall clinic population with asthma was assessed for care-process changes through random cross-sectional chart reviews at baseline and 24 months (N = 560).