Early on, MCAN recognized that it needed to address relevant healthcare policy and practice issues in order to foster sustainable improvements in the quality of asthma care for children. To set its public policy agenda, MCAN convened childhood asthma experts and thought leaders in 2006 to better understand the gap between what is known and actually implemented to control and manage asthma, the leading chronic disease among children in the United States. At this conference, the State of Childhood Asthma and Future Directions: Strategies for Implementing Best Practices, each participating thought leader offered pragmatic recommendations or approaches that could be implemented to improve quality, enhance access to care, and begin to close this gap. MCAN is currently working with national leaders in children's healthcare, asthma clinical and translational research, and health disparities on several of these recommendations to reform both policy and practice:

Asthma Outcomes Workshop

One of the recommendations from MCAN's State of Childhood Asthma Conference was to establish and promulgate a set of standard definitions for key variables in asthma-related clinical trial outcomes and other research through an NIH-led consensus process. MCAN is working with several institutes and centers from the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and other private foundations to host a workshop bringing together leaders in NIH-sponsored asthma clinical research, representatives of government agencies and members of communities who rely on clinical research findings, such as developers of clinical practice guidelines, health care providers, insurance providers, pharmaceutical companies, and community organizations. Participants in the workshop will be divided into working committees, and will be charged with developing standard definitions and data collection methodologies for established and validated outcomes measures in asthma clinical research with the goal to enable comparisons, including costs/benefit evaluations, across asthma studies and asthma treatment modalities. Workshop proceedings will be widely disseminated, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have indicated that they will consider workshop recommendations in determining policies and protocols for research programs. 

Comprehensive Asthma Project (CAP)

MCAN is working with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to facilitate implementation of the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Asthma in pediatric primary care settings, another recommendation from the State of Childhood Asthma Conference. Working through AAP's regional chapters, this collaboration seeks to improve quality and equity in asthma care for children through physician education, initiating quality improvement measures and systems change, and integrating asthma care into the medical home model.

Childhood Asthma Policy Reform Initiative

The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, Department of Health Policy, the RCHN Community Health Foundation and MCAN have partnered to establish a Childhood Asthma Policy Reform Initiative. The aim of this initiative, which will include the development of both a broad Policy Roadmap and detailed policy Action Plan, is to advance policies that reduce the incidence of childhood asthma and assure its effective management. The Childhood Asthma Policy Reform Initiative will be guided by a national advisory committee comprised of leading figures in asthma research, health and health care disparities, and national health policy. The Initiative encompasses four principal activities:

RAND-MCAN Study: Assessing the Business Case for Better Asthma Care in the Medicaid Population

MCAN commissioned the RAND Corporation to examine the relationship between asthma maintenance drug adherence and health care utilization by looking at a de-identified sample of asthmatic patients from medical claims records filed with private insurers.  RAND and MCAN applied this same research question to a de-identified Medicaid/State-Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) population and plan to disseminate the findings on how adherence is related to cost of care in these two different populations.

Collaboration with deLaski Family Foundation

MCAN and the deLaski Family Foundation are collaborating  to further MCAN's goal of advancing comprehensive community-based approaches that facilitate the adoption of effective asthma interventions that improve access to quality health care services for children and families. This collaboration allows MCAN to provide additional consultative and hands-on support to the Head-Off Environmental Asthma in Louisiana (HEAL) Project in the implementation of the asthma case manager intervention as well as promotion of quality asthma care through working with organizations in Washington, D.C., and the communities where Merck facilities are located through the Neighbor of Choice program.

The content on this page was last modified on September 15, 2009.

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