The Knox County Health Department (KCHD) and the Knox County Schools (KCS) participated in a rapid Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle with the goal of reducing the negative impact of asthma on KCS. With assistance from the Public Health Foundation's (PHF) Quality Improvement (QI) Experts, the KCHD and KCS team applied QI tools and methods such as brainstorming and flow-charting to identify barriers to asthma management and to learn about components that impact asthma student identification. The QI tools and methods helped the team to determine that the area in which they had the greatest opportunity for change and influence was on asthma education, policies and forms.

With a charitable contribution from AstraZeneca, PHF completed the final phase of We Can Do Better: Improving Asthma Outcomes in America in 2011, which brought together asthma stakeholders in the public health community to use QI tools and methods to identify areas where they could improve asthma management outcomes. Learn more by visiting the Asthma QI Demonstration Project page.