Peer mentor training to reduce hospitalizations for children with asthma

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this SBIR Fast-Track application is to develop a web-based program to train peer mentors to guide parents of children with asthma on methods to reduce ED visits and hospitalizations. There are 7.1 million children with asthma. Asthma is the cause of 10.5 million missed days of school, 7.5 million outpatient visits, 640,000 ED visits, and 157,000 hospitalization visits in 2008. Recent work by Fisher et al. (2009) has shown in a 2-year randomized clinical trial that trained peers mentors (lay individuals from the community) can be effective in reducing hospitalizations for asthmatic children from 59.1 percent to 36.5 percent (plt0.01). The training protocol used in the clinical trial involved 3 months ofin-person training. In-person training is too slow and expensive to allow for general dissemination of this effective method for reducing hospitalizations in children with asthma. To overcome this barrier to dissemination, we are developing a web-base