SAN FRANCISCO – Stepping up pharmacotherapy in children with poorly controlled asthma resulted in fewer asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits and inpatient stays than maintaining current medication therapy, a study found.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, the patients with the worst outcomes were those who were told only to improve their medication adherence, said Dane Snyder, MD, a physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital who is also in the department of pediatrics at Ohio State University, Columbus.
Dr. Dane Snyder
Asthma affects nearly 1 in 10 children, and national guidelines recommend step-up asthma pharmacotherapy in patients with poorly controlled asthma. The researchers assessed the impact of step-up therapy on inpatient care, and emergency and urgent care visits for children with poor asthma control in the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Primary Care Network in Columbus, Ohio. More than 10,000 asthma patients are treated at the 12 clinics in the network, and the study was part of a quality improvement initiative starting in July 2015.
Between August and October 2015, researchers used documentation in a standard asthma note to identify 908 patients aged 2-18 years who had poor asthma control based on their Asthma Control Test (ACT) score and history. Of these patients, 463 with a mean ACT score of 15.8 were assigned to step-up pharmacotherapy, while 445 with a mean ACT of 16.2 were not. The two groups also were similar in their use of unscheduled health care utilization in the 12 months before the study period.
Over the next 12 months, 1.3% of patients receiving step-up therapy had inpatient stays, compared with 4% in the other group, translating to a 68% lower risk of admission with step-up therapy (relative risk, 0.316; P = .01). Those receiving step-up therapy also were 37% less likely to visit the ED for asthma, with 7.1% of ED visits for those with step-up therapy and 11.2% of visits for those without it (RR, 0.634; P = .032). Visits to urgent care, however, showed no significant difference between those receiving step-up therapy (10.8%) and those who had not (10.3%).
After comparing these findings, the researchers went back and manually reviewed all 463 charts of the group who received step-up therapy to determine whether the children actually did receive a step up in therapy. Nearly a quarter (23%) of the children in the intervention group simply resumed taking their previously prescribed mediation, and 8% took allergy medication. The remaining 69% had step-up therapy.
The researchers then reanalyzed the data among those who truly had step-up pharmacotherapy, those who did not, and those who resumed taking their prior medication. The difference in inpatient admissions remained the same because none of the children who had resumed medication were admitted.
ED visits showed a more gradual distribution: 7.3% of those receiving step-up therapy, 8.4% of those who resumed taking their medication, and 11% of those with no intervention went to the ED. But these differences did not reach statistical significance.
Similarly, the differences among the three groups in urgent care visits was not statistically significant, but 15% of those who resumed taking prior medication had urgent care visits, compared with 10.3% of those with step-up therapy and 9.2% of those in the control group.
Those findings suggest that “stepping up pharmacotherapy, even in the face of controller nonadherence, can improve outcomes,” Dr. Snyder told his colleagues.
“While challenging, management changes in a large primary care network are possible,” Dr. Snyder said. He also emphasized that manually auditing bulk data, as they did with the 463 records, can be important in assessing outcomes of quality improvement measures.
The research did not use external funding, and Dr. Snyder had no disclosures.