Asthma care standardization in a pediatric emergency department: changing to discharge medications in-hand and understanding effects across the care continuum

Conclusions
Using improvement methodology, we increased the proportion of patients seen in the ED/UC who received OCS in-hand at discharge from 2% to 96% without any increase in 7 day returns requiring additional OCS. This practice change within one division had a ripple effect across multiple care sites, including inpatient change to dexamethasone and a standardized process for outpatient follow-up. Future work will focus on standardization of key decisions across ED/UC in collaboration with all key stakeholders.

Figure 1Primary outcome measure.

Figure 2Secondary outcome measure.

Figure 3Balancing measure.

Source: BMJ Quality and Safety - November 17, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Kurowski, E. M., Rinderknecht, A., Caruso, M., Oehler, J., Varadarajan, K., Doughty, L., Gordon, C., Kercsmar, C., Mansour, M., McDowell, K., Simmons, J., Iyer, S. Tags: Abstracts Source Type: research