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Steps to Quality Improvement > Evaluation > Evaluation Examples

The following initiatives and evaluations are taking place in various health care organizations.

Example 1

Disparity topic: Improving asthma care for African American and Latino children
Evaluation issue: Measuring patient outcomes—Is anyone better off?

Nationally, asthma poses a significant challenge for African American and Latino populations. In southeastern Pennsylvania, 16.2 percent of African Americans and 17.7 percent of Latino children have asthma, compared with only 8.7 percent of White children.

To improve care to this disproportionately affected population, Keystone Mercy Health Plan, a winner of NCQA’s 2006 Recognizing Innovation in Multicultural Health Care Awards, designed the Healthy Hoops55. NCQA. Innovative Practices in Multicultural Health Care 2006. Available at http://Web.ncqa.org/Default.aspx?tabid=453. October 5, 2007. program to use basketball as a platform to teach children and their families how to manage asthma more effectively. Program goals were:

  • reduce emergency room (ER) visits and hospital admissions
  • increase the use of appropriate medications
  • educate families about asthma management
  • integrate fitness into a comprehensive asthma management program for children and families.

Healthy Hoops included a kick-off program with professional basketball coaches, asthma screenings and education programs, basketball clinics and environmental assessments of participants’ homes to identify asthma triggers and family fitness programs. The program focused on African American and Latino children in West Philadelphia.

The Healthy Hoops evaluation approach focuses on measures that help answer the question "Is anyone better off?" (See Figure 1) Staff showed that the program led to the following improvements.

  • A decrease in the proportion of children with ER visits due to asthma (from 40 percent to 6 percent) and the proportion with hospitalizations (from 10 percent to 2 percent)
  • A 35 percent reduction in weekly use of rescue medications and a substantial increase (from 48 percent to 77 percent) in the proportion of children using regular controller therapies
  • A decrease in the proportion of children waking at night because of their asthma.

Because the program showed such significant success at improving health and health care for these children, it is being expanded to other cities and will include a focus on weight management, nutrition and exercise.

Other Examples:

Example 2
Example 3