Seminar Presentation
Dr. Flory Nkoy
Location: HSEB 4100B
Date: Mar. 1, 2012
Time: 4:15 pm
Abstract
Chronic asthma control remains suboptimal among patients with asthma in general and children in particular. Poor asthma control leads to frequent asthma exacerbations, poor quality of life and frequent urgent health care use (including ED visits and hospital admissions). To improve asthma control and reduce the risk of exacerbations, asthma guidelines recommend ongoing monitoring of chronic asthma symptoms and patient’s self-management with timely adjustments of preventive asthma therapy to achieve and maintain optimal control. However, establishing regular monitoring of asthma patients outside clinical encounters is challenging. The current health care system is fragmented and focuses on intermittent acute rather than preventive care. In addition, primary care providers lack resources, time, incentives, and tools to support regular patient monitoring outside clinical encounters.
This presentation will describe results of +5 years of work initiated to improve long-term care for children with asthma post-hospitalization. It will also introduce and share preliminary results following evaluation of the Asthma Symptom Tracker, an innovative, patient-centered tool developed to 1) engage children and their parents in regular self-monitoring and self-management to prompt early response to deteriorations in asthma control and 2) to support primary care providers with objective data to assess the effectiveness of asthma therapy and prompt adjustments. This tool represents a shift in asthma management from the current reactive acute care model to a preventive, proactive approach where treatment decisions are tailored to patients’ individual patterns of asthma chronic control to prevent acute exacerbations.
Bio
Dr. Nkoy is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Utah, Department of Pediatrics and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. He also serves as the Research Director for the Division of Pediatric Inpatient Medicine. In addition to clinical medicine, Dr. Nkoy’s background includes training in public health, medical informatics and quality improvement with an emphasis on implementation and dissemination research. His work utilizes these skills to pioneer new approaches to improve long-term asthma care and reduce the risks for recurrent ED and hospital admissions. Dr. Nkoy is the Principal Investigator of two major research grants from the AHRQ. The first grant provides resources to study the process by which organizational and other contextual factors in health care delivery environments influence implementation of evidence-based care in routine clinical practice. This grant has also served as the basis to develop and implement the Asthma Symptom Tracker. He is a reviewer for a number of medical journals and has been a grant reviewer for the NIH “Implementation and Dissemination Research” study section. Dr. Nkoy has an established and highly qualified research team that collaborates with 2 national leaders in asthma to facilitate implementation and dissemination of Asthma Symptoms Tracker broadly.