Adult Asthma Surveillance and Intervention in a Managed Care Setting

1. To determine if there are gender differences in asthma prevalence, severity, treatment, and health care utilization within patient populations in Kaiser Permanente Northwest and Colorado Regions. 2. To test the ability of an automated telephone outreach intervention to reduce health care utilization for acute asthma exacerbations and improve quality of life. The intervention used speech recognition technology to gather information about current asthma control, patterns of medication use, and recent acute health care utilization for asthma. This information allowed the intervention to provide tailored educational feedback and to flag patients deemed to be at high risk for future exacerbations so that they could be followed up by the health care system.