Objectives: To investigate whether asthma coaching decreases emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalizations and increases outpatient asthma monitoring visits.
Design: Randomized controlled trial.
Setting: Urban tertiary care children's hospital.
Participants: Primary caregivers (hereafter referred to as parents) of children aged 2 to 10 years with asthma who have Medicaid insurance coverage and are urban residents who were attending the ED for acute asthma care.
Intervention: Eighteen months of participating in usual care (control group) vs receiving coaching focused on asthma home management, completion of periodic outpatient asthma monitoring visits, and development of a collaborative relationship with a primary care provider (intervention group).
Main outcome measures: The primary outcome was ED visits. Secondary outcomes were hospitalizations and asthma monitoring visits (nonacute visits focused on asthma care). Outcomes were measured during the year before and 2 years after enrollment.
Results: We included 120 intervention parents and 121 control parents. More children of coached parents had at least 1 asthma monitoring visit after enrollment (relative risk [RR], 1.21; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04-1.41), but proportions with at least 4 asthma monitoring visits during 2 years were low (20.0% in the intervention group vs 9.9% in the control group). Similar proportions of children in both study groups had at least 1 ED visit (59.2% in the intervention group vs 62.8% in the control group; RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.77-1.15) and at least 1 hospitalization (24.2% in the intervention group vs 26.4% in the control group; 0.91; 0.59-1.41) after enrollment. An ED visit after enrollment was more likely if an ED visit had occurred before enrollment (RR, 1.46; 95% CI, 1.16-1.86; adjusted for study group), but risk was similar in both study groups when adjusted for previous ED visits (1.02; 0.82-1.27).
Conclusion: This parental asthma coaching intervention increased outpatient asthma monitoring visits (although infrequent) but did not decrease ED visits.
Trial registration: clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00149500.