Emergency Department Allies: a Web-based multihospital pediatric asthma tracking system.

Objective: To describe the development of a Web-based multihospital pediatric asthma tracking system and present results from the initial 18-month implementation of patient tracking experience.

Design: The Emergency Department (ED) Allies tracking system is a secure, password-protected data repository. Use-case methodology served as the foundation for technical development, testing, and implementation. Seventy-seven data elements addressing sociodemographics, wheezing history, quality of life, triggers, and ED managment were included for each subject visit.

Setting: The ED Allies partners comprised 1 academic pediatric ED and 5 community EDs.

Population: Subjects with a physician diagnosis of asthma who presented to the ED for acute respiratory complaints composed the asthma group; subjects lacking a physician diagnosis of asthma but presenting with wheezing composed the wheezing group.

Results: The tracking-system development and implementation process included identification of data elements, system database and use case development, and delineation of screen features, system users, reporting functions, and help screens. For the asthma group, 2005 subjects with physician-diagnosed asthma were enrolled between July 15, 2002 and January 14, 2004. These subjects accounted for 2978 visits; 10.4% had > or = 3 visits. Persistent asthma was noted in 68% of the subjects. During the same time period, 1297 wheezing subjects with a total of 1628 ED visits (wheezing group) were entered into the tracking system. After enrollment, 57% of the subjects with > or = 1 subsequent ED visits received a physician diagnosis of asthma.

Conclusions: Our sophisticated tracking system facilitated data collection and identified key intervention opportunities for a diverse ED wheezing population. A significant asthma burden was identified with significant rates of hospitalization, acute care visits and persistent asthma in 68% of subjects. The surveillance component provided important insights into health care issues of both asthmatic subjects and wheezing subjects, many of whom subsequently were diagnosed with asthma.