Asthma Center of Excellence

The practice runs an asthma program that is geared towards the patient and parent achieving a full understanding of the asthma and improving patient management. In addition, our Asthma Center of Excellence program focuses on providing high quality, most comprehensive service for children and adolescents with difficult-to-treat or severe asthma. The main objective of the program is to reduce asthma related mortality and morbidity including hospitalizations, emergency department visits, missed school days, and activity limitations.

Severe or difficult-to-treat asthma is characterized by ongoing symptoms and frequent severe exacerbations despite treatment with high doses of inhaled corticosteroids and/or need for systemic corticosteroids. Although the prevalence of severe or difficult-to-treat asthma estimated to account only for about 10% asthma patients, it contributes for a significant share of asthma related poor outcomes. Despite advances in asthma therapy over the last few decades, a significant proportion of children with asthma continue to suffer from suboptimal asthma control.

Our asthma program utilizes pediatric pulmonologists with extensive knowledge in asthma diagnosis and management. We provide high quality evidence based therapy for all children with asthma with particular focus on difficult-to-treat or severe asthma.

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The cardinal goals of the program are to:

  • Diagnose and characterize the severity of the disease in the patient.
  • Ensure that patients and parents understand asthma, its cause, and management.
  • Identify, treat and where possible modify the environment to decrease the impact of allergies on the child
  • Give patient and parents acceptable expectations for daily life such as improving exercise tolerance in children, decreasing the incidence of coughing and preventing the onset of a sedentary or inactive lifestyle
  • Decrease the duration and severity of respiratory illnesses by instituting an anticipatory management program that decreases the likelihood of acute asthma attacks or prolonged colds.
  • Improve quality of life by decreasing incidences of nocturnal symptoms, which may affect the quality of sleep in the patient, as well as decreasing sick days or missed school days
  • Establish an active partnership with primary care physicians by identifying at- risk population and providing asthma-related education services
  • Provide primary care physician with an easy screening tool (Tab. 1) that enables them to identify children and adolescents with difficult-to-treat or severe persistent asthma

Table 1: An easy-to-use screening tool for Severe or Difficult-to-treat asthma

Has your child been diagnosed with asthma? Yes or No

Please answer the following questions regarding your child: