Development of an asthma management system in a pediatric emergency department.

Asthma is the leading chronic childhood disease with exacerbations resulting in urgent and emergency care visits. Guidelines adherence improves patient care but is suboptimal. A computerized guideline system can help improve compliance through automatic initiation and reminders to increase adherence. We designed a computerized management system for asthma care in the pediatric emergency department (ED). The system will be evaluated in two phases. The first phase evaluates a computerized diagnostic prompt using the ED's existing asthma protocol. The second phase evaluates a computerized asthma management system including temporal reminder elements for scoring and medication orders. The system was developed in conjunction with the pediatric ED multidisciplinary care team. The computerized system is entirely automatic and a prospective evaluation of the diagnostic component is ongoing.