Informing Policy to Implement Pediatric Family Engagement in Meaningful Use Stage 3

Overview

This study will enroll parents/guardians of children who receive treatment at one of the pediatric primary care practice settings in the Pediatric Research in Office Settings (PROS) network or at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC) network. The study will use an evidence-based conceptual model to study determinants of implementation success, implementation outcomes, and health care outcomes resulting from implementing an already functional, electronic health record (EHR)-linked asthma portal, MyAsthma. The study will measure the portal's feasibility and determine the impact on providing asthma education and fostering patient engagement as well as the ability to collect patient-reported outcomes for children, evaluate medication use and side effects and track parents' preferences and goals.

This study uses a newly published, evidence-based conceptual model to study the determinants of implementation success, implementation outcomes, and health care outcomes resulting from implementing an asthma portal, MyAsthma, in the national, Agency for Health Care Research and Quality(AHRQ)-funded, Center for Pediatric Practice Research and Learning. Technically, the portal will be implemented with 2 innovative approaches that facilitate rapid cycle evaluation in multiple Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Although many patient portals are simple vehicles for transferring information about upcoming appointments, test results or laboratory findings, the asthma portal in this project extends this basic functionality to provide asthma education, collect patient-reported outcomes, evaluate medication use and side effects, and track parents' preferences and goals. Because asthma is an AHRQ priority condition which addresses three AHRQ priority criteria (children, low income, and special health care needs), our study will use this population to focus on stage 3 Meaningful Use (MU3) objectives. It is the hope that by conducting this study, translational knowledge will be gained to make recommendations for practice implementation and actionable policy statements.