Current Research at the Crocker Research Program
Improving Asthma Medication Adherence Through Telehealthcare
MATCH is a multicenter randomized trial that evaluates a medication therapy management video telehealthcare intervention to address poor medication adherence in children and adults with poorly controlled asthma. Dr. Crocker is the site principal investigator for Seattle Children’s for this study, which is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the American Lung Association. This study will determine whether having regular telehealth appointments with a pharmacist will help adolescents and young adults with asthma better understand and use their inhaled medications and experience fewer asthma symptoms.
Developing an Action Plan to Protect Against Wildfire Smoke
This project aims to gather stakeholder input to help develop an intervention to reduce risk of wildfire smoke (WFS) for children with asthma. WFS has become an increasingly important public health concern in the Pacific Northwest as the number of fires and length of fire season continue to increase due to climate change. Children with asthma are especially sensitive to health effects from WFS. While there are many public health recommendations that give guidance on how to avoid WFS exposure, this advice can be hard to implement in real life.
Our team has developed a draft Wildfire Smoke Action Plan intended to empower families of children with asthma to reduce their child’s risk of WFS exposure. This research project will gather stakeholder input on the content of the action plan, which will be used to revise and improve the plan for future implementation in Washington state. We aim to interview a variety of stakeholders, including parents, public health practitioners, academic experts, healthcare providers and members of community-based organizations to elicit their perspectives on the action plan’s potential effectiveness, acceptability and feasibility.
Remote Home Inspection Pilot Program (REHIP)
Asthma is a significant health problem for children in the United States and in the state of Washington, where it affects 104,000 children annually. Environmental triggers such as poor air quality and allergens are significant drivers of asthma morbidity, and exposure to these triggers is heavily influenced by social determinants of health, making asthma an important environmental health issue and cause of poor health in low-resourced communities.
Community health worker (CHW) programs such as the Public Health - Seattle & King County (PHSKC) Asthma Program bring CHWs into homes where they address environmental triggers directly by performing an environmental home inspection and provide education and support. The PHSKC program and other similar models have been consistently proven to improve asthma outcomes and reduce health care costs. During the coronavirus pandemic, in-person CHW services have been curtailed, and the use of remote or virtual platforms (e.g., Zoom) has been proposed due to their rapid uptake in other venues. However, reliance on such technologies raises concerns regarding barriers to access of technology experienced by disadvantaged populations, technical feasibility of adapting the environmental home inspection to a virtual format and acceptability of such an intervention to participants and CHWs.
This pilot project works to improve asthma outcomes by using a community-engaged approach in collaboration with PHSKC to develop a remote video technology-based intervention to reduce exposure to environmental triggers in children with low access to resources. The first phase of this project gathers perspectives from parents of children with asthma and community health workers on what a virtual intervention should look like. The second phase involves collaboration with the team at PHSKC to develop the new intervention. In the third phase, we will pilot the new intervention by delivering it to parents of kids with asthma, and we’ll test the intervention’s acceptability and feasibility.