Creative Coaching for Kids

The statistics on asthma are staggering. More than 17 million Americans are affected by the disease, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Of these, nearly 500,000 are hospitalized each year for asthma-related complications. Across the country, health care providers are looking to education in order to reduce the incidence of asthma attacks, thus reducing the cost of emergency department visits and hospitalizations.

In Virginia, one health system has devised a creative solution for accessing at-risk children and teaching them how to manage their asthma. Chesapeake-based Sentara Home Care Services, a division of Sentara Healthcare, uses telemonitoring to teach middle-school children about their asthma, triggers they should avoid and proper use of their medication and equipment.

The company's TeleCoach asthma program utilizes a remote telemonitoring station dressed up like a coach to connect children at the Hunt-Mapp Middle School in Portsmouth, Va., to home care nurses in the Sentara office. The interactive system has two-way live audiovisual capabilities that enable the nurses to listen to the students' lungs while educating them about seasonal asthma triggers and solutions.

The goal of the program, says Rhonda Chetney, RN, MS, director of clinical operations for SHCS and one of the creators of the TeleCoach program, is to keep kids in school — and out of the hospital.

CREATING THE SOLUTION

The company recognized that a number of children — who were difficult to follow due to their families' frequently changing contact information — were being referred to its existing childhood asthma program. Chetney and her staff knew that one-on-one contact would be the most productive way to educate these children and their parents, but the traditional method of calling for appointments, even showing up at their homes on weekends and evenings, was not working.

So Chetney looked to Sentara's Cardiac Connection program — which uses video telemonitoring to provide comprehensive home care to patients with congestive heart failure — to develop a telemonitoring concept that would work for children with asthma. Further, the team developed a plan to connect with the at-risk children in a place where they are easily located: school.