Eliza Holland, MD, sees great benefit in UVA's participation in the pediatric asthma effort.
The University of Virginia Children’s Hospital is among 89 hospitals involved in a national improvement collaborative for children seen in the emergency department or hospitalized with asthma. The program is led by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and Dr. Sunitha Kaiser, MD, MSc, FAAP.
Asthma affects nearly 10 percent of American children and is a leading cause of pediatric emergency visits and hospitalizations.
“As a referral center, we care for a number of patients from all over the state with asthma. Participating in this collaborative will allow us to provide the most current care for our patients while working with other hospitals around the country. We can then share what we have learned with our referring physicians and hospitals. This is a joint project with the Pediatric Emergency Department, so we can work together to streamline care,” said Dr. Eliza Holland, MD, a pediatric hospitalist at UVA.
“Physicians face tremendous barriers to consistently practicing evidence-based care. This leads to inappropriate variability in important outcomes for children with asthma, like rates of admission to hospitals and intensive care units. The goal of this project, Pathways for Improving Pediatric Asthma Care (PIPA), is to support hospitals around the country in addressing those barriers,” Dr. Kaiser said.
The project will be conducted by the Value in Inpatient Pediatrics (VIP) Network. PIPA, like previous VIP Network projects, provides content and quality-improvement expert guidance within a low-cost virtual learning collaborative, leveraging health information technology.
This project will assist UVA Children’s Hospital in providing children across Virginia with high-quality and evidence-based asthma care. The project will offer tools to help healthcare providers select medications, order tests and effectively counsel families.
This project will also offer Continuing Medical Education and American Board of Pediatrics Maintenance of Certification credits to physicians who meet the qualifying criteria.
Resources and strategies developed as part of the project will be available through the Academy’s Quality Improvement Innovation Networks website, a clearinghouse of information and resources for quality improvement, on the VIP website.
For more information about University of Virginia Children’s Hospital, visit https://childrens.uvahealth.com.
Local Contact: Josh Barney, University of Virginia Health System: 434.906.8864 or jdb9a@virginia.edu
AAP Contact: Susan Stevens Martin, Director of News, Media, and Public Relations, 847-434-7131 or ssmartin@aap.org
