Community Health Workers Teach Asthma Patients to Breathe Easier

Kimberly Artis, community health educator

Kimberly Artis, community health educator

When an asthma patient showed her inhaler, Kimberly Artis was encouraged, at first.

“She shook the medicine up and I’m thinking in my head, OK that’s good,” says Artis, a community health educator with Sinai Health System in Chicago. “The next thing she did was take a cleansing breath, and I’m like, that’s even better because most people don’t do this.”

Then the patient sprayed the inhaler over her shoulder and took a breath of the room air, and Artis knew why this patient wasn’t getting better. “If the doctor asked her if she was taking her medication, she would have said yes, because she thought she was doing it correctly,” Artis says.

Artis was hired to help patients in their own homes, and to keep them out of emergency rooms. Outreach workers like Artis have helped Sinai cut return visits. Sinai, which includes Mount Sinai, Holy Cross and Sinai Children’s hospitals, estimates the visits save $3,200 per patient, more than $5 for every dollar spent. Now the technique is spreading to treat other environmental health conditions in underserved neighborhoods.

Asthma affects 9.1 percent of Chicago adults, compared with 8 percent nationwide. It’s one of the top 10 reasons Chicagoans land in the hospital, with 7,325 hospital cases in 2012, according to a Chicago Department of Public Health analysis of state records.

“We’ve been working to address asthma disparities in the communities we serve on the West Side of Chicago since 2001,” says Helen Margellos-Anast, Sinai’s senior epidemiologist and asthma program director. “We focus on helping people understand what asthma is, recognizing it early in its trajectory – understanding these are the early symptoms, and I have to treat them now.”

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Does your building not recycle? Report it here!

mybuildingdoesntThe Environmental Breakout Group at OpenGov Hack Night has been working on a site to report buildings that don’t recycle. Chicago’s ordinances require buildings with five or more rental units to provide recycling. However, the city doesn’t always enforce this law leading some landlords to not provide recycling.

Claire Micklin, Ben Wilhelm, and Alex Kahn put together to help residents report buildings that don’t recycle.

The team will be using the data to visualize reports of buildings that don’t recycle and provide a hub for residents seeking more comprehensive recycling services.  Already, the site has received 900 reports on 750 locations in the first week that it launched. (The site was getting hit so much that it was running into Google’s API limits – and so they started using Smart Chicago’s Google API account.)

Micklin first started the project after seeing so many of her neighbors blue bins filled up constantly because neighboring buildings weren’t providing recycling.

Micklin says she found working with the Environment Breakout to be really helpful for finding resources and coming up with ideas on how to do it. Scott Beslow, who helps lead the breakout group, helped put the bones together in terms of constructing the site and getting developers interested. The team used the OpenCity Apps Github repository to collaborate on the app.

The site was announced at last week’s OpenGov Hack Night to rave reviews and has appeared on WBEZ, the Mike Nowack Show, and DNAinfo. Here’s WBEZ talking to Micklin:

The group hopes to use the information to lobby for stronger enforcement of the recycling ordinance. The team will continue to work on the app during OpenGov Hack Night which happens every Tuesday at 6:00pm at the offices of Braintree.