Asthma is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in children, a significant financial burden to the U.S. healthcare system and source of lost days at school and at work (parents). Community-level surveillance using socio-economic factors and demographic data has been useful in the management of pediatric asthma patients. To date, though, access to recent community-level surveillance data about a specific patient’s environment has been unavailable during examinations at the clinics.
Breathe Austin was designed as a pilot study to assess feasibility of creating a real-time SDoH data visualization portal presented in the EHR at the point of care, specifically for the care of pediatric asthma. The data visualization portal provides SDoH data combined with clinical data in order to display additional information to the health care provider as they assess a child with pediatric asthma. We partnered with a local clinic to focus on pediatric patients (from 0 to 17 years of age) with recent diagnoses related to asthma.
The platform we piloted has several components: 1) ongoing collection of regional SDoH information, 2) collecting patient-specific SDoH information and clinical information at the time of care, 3) presenting the data visualization within the EHR at the point of care based on the two sets of SDoH data combined with clinical information, 4) managing the consenting process for the research study, and 5) collecting information on the use and usability of the platform.
This research was funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.