Jump to main content.

National Environmental Leadership Awards - Past Award Winners

In Their Own Words

"I’m extremely honored by our award from the EPA and proud of our growing partnership with them. The EPA is one of the premier organizations in our country that is fighting for higher standards for clean air, a cause that SSB celebrates. SSB looks forward to an ongoing relationship that is rooted in our common goal to create a healthier world for our members and their communities."

John Monahan, 2006 Award Winner
President of Blue Cross of California State Sponsored Business (SSB).

"We were very honored to win this award on behalf of Children’s Mercy Hospital and Family Health Partners. Receiving this award empowered us to continue the great work we were doing and take it to the next level. Our health plan received an additional state contract because of our success and award winning management of asthma and indoor environments.

Our goal is to take what we learned from our hard work on effective asthma management with families and apply this knowledge to building effective asthma management for the entire community. The more we can improve awareness education in our community, the healthier our community will be for all children."

Kevin Kennedy, 2005 Award Winner
Program Manager, Environmental Health Program,
Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics

Winners of the prestigious National Environmental Leadership Award in Asthma Management serve as models for health plans and providers looking for ways to improve health outcomes for their asthma patients.  More about the Leadership Awards.

These previous winners have received national recognition in a variety of ways. They are featured on EPA’s Web site and in an Agency press release, several have served as speakers at various events across the country to highlight their programs’ successes, and they are serving as mentors to help other programs achieve fantastic results.

Join these leaders and receive national recognition for your successful efforts to help people with asthma lead healthy, active lives.

2008 Award Winners

2007 Award Winners

2006 Award Winners

2005 Award Winners

Read about the 2005 winners in the article, “Recognizing the Environmental Role in Asthma Management Programs,” that appeared in AHIP Coverage, a magazine published by America’s Health Insurance Plans (Kral K and Belmont K. "Recognizing the environmental role in asthma management programs." AHIP Coverage. 2005 Sept-Oct: 52-59.)

Priority Health, Grand Rapids, Michigan

From Left: Ruth Kavanagh, Elizabeth Cotsworth, Mary Cooley
Click on the image for a larger version

Priority Health is a non-profit health plan that serves more than 19,000 people asthma in 43 Michigan counties. In the late 1990s, Priority Health recognized the need for home-based asthma care that includes environmental trigger management. To deliver effective home-based care, Priority Health formed a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Asthma Network of West Michigan (ANWM). Priority Health uses ANWM’s case managers and social workers to increase its ability to effectively assess and educate its members. ANWM provides home-based education; home environmental assessments; and resources to reduce exposures to environmental asthma triggers.

Today, all of the plan’s members with moderate or high risk asthma within ANWM’s service area receive intensive case management that integrates patient education, home-based environmental interventions, and evidence-based clinical care. Priority Health also reimburses ANWM for meeting with providers to develop individualized care plans. These plans are the cornerstone for determining appropriate interventions, monitoring, and follow-up. Priority Health provides incentives to their providers to ensure that members use asthma medications appropriately and to implement the Planned Care Model for asthma. The results of these programs include improved medication use and significant reduction in the number of emergency room visits and hospitalizations for asthma. Utilization data show that emergency room visits were reduced from 72 visits per thousand patients in 2002 to 40 in 2006 for commercial members, and from 250 to 189 for Medicaid members. Savings over time for members are estimated at $1.7 million, and the long-term return on investment (ROI) for Priority Health is 2.1:1.

MaineHealth AH! Program, Portland, Maine

From Left: Donna Levi, Julie Osgood, Elizabeth Cotsworth, Rhonda Vosmus
Click on the image for a larger version

MaineHealth's service area covers 90,675 patients with asthma, including 27,156 children in southern, central, and western Maine. The AH! (Asthma Health) Program combines standards-based clinical care in the patients’ communities with robust indoor and outdoor environmental asthma management. Patients receive in-depth counseling to manage exposures to environmental triggers in home, school, and work settings. Educational materials are culturally appropriate, translated into six languages, and use pictograms for low literacy populations. The Program supports wide dissemination of information on outdoor asthma triggers including ozone and particulate matter. The AH! Program has a strong presence outside its clinical settings, having built long-term relationships with community organizations, schools and daycare centers, public health departments, and others. The AH! Program also takes leadership positions to advocate for municipal, state, or national public policy actions -- such as bans on tobacco use in public places -- that create asthma-friendly environments.

The AH! Program is strongly committed to providing integrated health care; they have created advisory committees that provide regular communication and coordination with primary and specialty care physicians, asthma educators, care managers, home health nurses, and others in the community interested in asthma care outcomes. The results of these impressive efforts have reduced emergency room use, hospitalizations, and missed school and work days, and improved physician adherence with national guidelines for asthma care. Evaluations at six months post-intervention show a 61 percent reduction in appropriate emergency room use and a 29 percent reduction in hospitalizations. Research over the past nine years shows that the improvements at six months are largely sustained. Maine Medical Center, one of MaineHealth’s member hospitals, achieved a reduction in emergency room visits from 81 percent to 20 percent and hospitalizations from 32 percent to 3 percent. These improved outcomes resulted in 2006 avoided costs of $61,635 on emergency room visits and $411,470 on hospitalizations.

Top of page

2006 AWARD WINNERS

Blue Cross of California, State Sponsored Business Unit

Blue Cross of California, State Sponsored Business Unit (SSB), has designed a Comprehensive Asthma Intervention Program (CAIP) to improve care for California Medi-Cal and Healthy Families members with asthma. Because standard asthma management programs seldom address the needs of all members in a culturally and linguistically diverse, low-income population, like the Blue Cross SSB membership, who often face environmental health challenges, CAIP encompasses innovative partnerships with members, providers, academic institutions, public health organizations, and communities, to maximize opportunities for improved asthma outcomes. CAIP includes individual member outreach; resources and incentives for physicians and pharmacists to encourage improved asthma care; Plan/Practice Improvement Project (PPIP), a collaboration modeled after the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Breakthrough Series, to enhance asthma chronic care through practice-specific redesign; Valley Air Quality Project, a county-specific partnership to improve community responses to environmental air pollution affecting the respiratory health of Fresno County, where asthma prevalence is high.
 

IMPACT DC

Improving Pediatric Asthma Care in the District of Columbia (IMPACT DC) Asthma Clinic targets inner-city, minority and disadvantaged children who suffer disproportionate asthma morbidity and mortality. Most live with challenging social and environmental circumstances with daily exposure to multiple asthma triggers. Their families often have a tenuous connection with their primary care providers, and thus frequently rely on emergency departments (EDs) for asthma care. While EDs typically provide excellent episodic care for acute asthma exacerbations, they usually pay little attention to longitudinal management issues. As a result, many families view asthma as an episodic problem instead of a chronic disease requiring daily management. IMPACT DC’s fully validated program recruits from a large urban ED (Children’s National Medical Center) and focuses on three distinct domains: environmental control, medical management, and longitudinal care. In a prospective clinical trial, it improved multiple patient outcomes. It is an innovative, replicable, and cost-efficient national model for asthma mitigation among children in the inner city.
 

Top of page

2005 AWARD WINNERS

Optima Health

The staff at Optima Health Plan – the managed care division of Sentara Health Care that operates in southeastern Virginia – noticed a disturbing trend: despite pharmacological advances in asthma therapy, the number of emergency room visits, hospitalization rates, and medical costs for asthma patients continued to rise. The quality of life for the approximately 8,500 asthma patients enrolled in Optima’s plan was not as high as Optima’s staff thought it should be and staff was committed to helping their asthma patients understand everything they could do to prevent asthma attacks. Optima’s staff also knew that education and management advice were often most effective when delivered at home so they developed an innovative “Asthma Life Coach” program that sends nurses and respiratory therapists to asthma patients’ homes where they work with patients and their caregivers to identify environmental triggers, such as secondhand smoke, cockroaches, dust mites, mold, and other sources that can trigger asthma attacks. Optima’s staff understood that many asthma patients simply don’t know that things in their homes, schools, and other environments can trigger asthma attacks and that many asthma triggers can be eliminated through simple management techniques. The Asthma Life Coach program provided an easy way for Optima’s asthma patients to learn about environmental asthma triggers and how to reduce exposure to them. Optima’s staff visited patients at home where they surveyed their environments, reviewed their use of medicines, and developed individualized written asthma treatment plans incorporating medical and environmental components. Optima’s Asthma Life Coaches serve as coordinators helping patients take action based on disease management suggestions and physician recommendations and ensuring that patients know how to use medical and environmental controls to manage their asthma. Since instituting the Asthma Life Coach program in 1999, Optima has seen a significant decrease in the number of hospitalizations and emergency room visits for their members with asthma.
 

Top of page

Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics

Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics — serving families in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri — uses a creative approach for managing pediatric asthma. Children’s Mercy trained a team of asthma educators to implement a three-part environmental asthma management program that included education for providers and staff; personalized case management and education for families with high hospital utilization due to asthma; and in-home, school, and day care environmental assessments to determine the presence of asthma triggers. Children’s Mercy determined that for those patients with severe cases of asthma, home-based, hands-on education about the common environmental asthma triggers was critical to ensuring that patients gained control over their asthma and made the connection between their asthma symptoms and environmental triggers in their home environment. During the home assessments, Children’s Mercy staff conducts a comprehensive environmental and safety assessment that identifies common environmental asthma triggers. Based on the home assessments, asthma educators provide personalized environmental health action plans to help patients and their families identify their asthma triggers and to reduce these triggers in their home. Through a creative partnership with the Healthy Homes Network for Kansas City, and funded by a HUD Healthy Homes Demonstration grant, qualifying families are provided up to $2,000 worth of home supplies and repairs to try to reduce environmental asthma triggers. As a result of Children’s Mercy’s efforts, patients and their families know more about what triggers their asthma and how to control asthma symptoms. Children’s Mercy has seen fewer emergency department visits and hospitalizations since the program’s inception.
 

Top of page

2005 Honorable Mentions

Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island

Founded in 1993, Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island (NHPRI) is the leading provider of health insurance to low income and minority children and families in the state, serving nearly 75,000 Medicaid members.  NHPRI’s asthma program has one simple goal: to enable members with persistent asthma to live normal, healthy lives. To achieve their goal, NHPRI developed a multi-faceted education and outreach program to address environmental management of asthma, with educational modules tailored to the needs of providers, asthma patients and their families. NHPRI gave providers clinical practice guidelines; continuing medical education credits for learning about environmental asthma management; and incentives for referring patients to the home visit component of NHPRI’s asthma management program. NHPRI also offers a range of services for patients. The services vary depending on the patient’s asthma severity. Patients diagnosed with severe persistent asthma and who have been hospitalized or visited an emergency room automatically receive an initial call or home visit from an Asthma Case Manager and ongoing interactions to educate the patient and family about comprehensive asthma management. NHPRI developed a more specialized home visit program called “Beating Asthma,” for patients with persistent asthma living within three high-need communities. To reach those patients, NHPRI trained bilingual and bicultural Asthma Advocates to conduct home visits that combine education about medical management with an assessment of environmental asthma triggers found in the home and information on controlling them. Patients and families that participate in the “Beating Asthma” program, receive a calling card, peak flow meter, a written, personalized Asthma Action Plan, allergy-free mattress and pillow covers, and a supermarket gift card. NHPRI’s preliminary results indicate that participants in the “Beating Asthma” program have experienced a reduction in emergency department visits, use of rescue medications, and unscheduled outpatient visits. NHPRI’s approach targets healthcare providers and asthma patients to ensure that each group receives the information it most needs to reduce the burden of asthma for Rhode Island families.

Connecticut Children’s Medical Center Easy Breathing Community Initiative

The Easy Breathing Program improved asthma care by educating primary care clinicians about disease management standards and the importance of environmental asthma management. The program was launched in 1998 to serve a poor, urban community in Connecticut where approximately 85% of the children served were Medicaid and SCHIP-eligible. The Easy Breathing Program has been so successful and well-documented that, over time, it has been replicated by healthcare providers and clinics throughout Connecticut and across the country. Easy Breathing focuses on training healthcare providers in the appropriate use of pharmacologic therapies, environmental management, and culturally appropriate patient outreach. Providers receive asthma management education in phases – starting with guidance on recognizing asthma, followed by tips on successfully managing it. As providers moved through the phases of learning, they requested additional information and outreach materials that they could use with their patients. Easy Breathing provided culturally appropriate materials for providers to use to educate patients from all backgrounds and language communities. Easy Breathing coached providers on identifying a patient’s asthma severity, skin testing patients to identify allergens that trigger each patient’s asthma, and developing personalized asthma treatment plans with patients and their caretakers that include guides on using appropriate medications and following environmental asthma management techniques. In collaboration with the Hartford Pediatric Asthma Coalition, Easy Breathing developed a standardized home environmental assessment tool to survey home environments and make recommendations to families living with asthma on how to reduce environmental asthma triggers. To date, over 55,000 children in Connecticut have been enrolled in Easy Breathing and participants have shown a significant decline in hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and an increase in the appropriate use of medications. 

Top of page

About the Indoor Environments Division | Where You Live | FAQs | Site Index

Local Navigation

Jump to main content.