No abstract

Asthma is the second most costly chronic disease in children. 1 Emergency department (ED) visits, admissions, and readmissions account for the most expensive components of care. Ensuring patient possession of medications at discharge from hospitalization is a recognized strategy to reduce unplanned presentations to care. [2][3][4] Although medication possession does not guarantee adherence to a treatment plan, it eliminates the posthospitalization burden of going to a pharmacy, makes certain families have cleared all insurance barriers, and allows medicationrelated questions to be answered with the product in hand. However, routine disbursement of outpatient medications before discharge is not standard care for most pediatric abstract BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Many patients recently discharged from an asthma admission do not fill discharge prescriptions. If unable to adhere to a discharge plan, patients with asthma are at risk for re-presentation to care. We sought to increase the proportion of patients discharged from an asthma admission in possession of their medications (meds in hand) from a baseline of 0% to >75%.