An important goal for MCAN is to advocate for policies that expedite the implementation, dissemination and sustainability of science-based asthma care.

Changing Policy: The Elements for Improving Childhood Asthma Outcomes

Commissioned by MCAN, in collaboration with the RCHN Community Health Foundation (CHF), this report is the result of a landmark study by health policy researchers at George Washington University (GWU) to determine:

• Why children in the U.S. are not benefiting more from science-based asthma treatment and management
• What policy reforms are essential to improve asthma outcomes

For more information, click here.

The Affordable Care Act, Medical Homes, and Childhood Asthma: A Key Opportunity for Progress

This policy brief, authored by GWU, and supported by MCAN and RCHN CHF, focuses on how the medical-home model supports comprehensive, patient-centered care by fostering partnerships between patients and their providers, including primary care doctors, pediatricians, specialists and emergency service providers.

For more information, click here.

NIH Asthma Outcomes Workshop

The NIH Asthma Outcomes Workshop was funded by The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), MCAN and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and took place March 15-16, 2010, in Bethesda, Maryland. The workshop had two purposes:

• To develop standard definitions and data collection methodologies for established and validated outcomes measures in asthma clinical research. The goal is to enable comparisons, including costs/benefit evaluations, across asthma studies and asthma treatment modalities.
• To identify promising outcomes for asthma clinical research and record their potential, development status and further validation needs.

Participants included more than 130 leaders in NIH-sponsored asthma clinical research, representatives of government agencies and members of communities who rely on clinical research findings, such as developers of clinical practice guidelines, healthcare providers, insurance providers, pharmaceutical companies and community organizations. Workshop proceedings will be published. NHLBI and NIAID will promote the use of outcome definitions and will beta-test outcome measures in their NIH clinical research networks.