Children ages 5-14 in Hampton Roads were hospitalized for asthma at nearly twice the statewide rate in 2024, according to the Virginia Department of Health.
For Jessica Parrott, the most concerning part is that asthma is “100% treatable.”
Parrott is the director of the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Program at Old Dominion University and a nurse practitioner with Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters Urgent Care.
“It's really not okay that those kids are having to have so many (emergency department) visits and then potentially death from it when we can do something about it beforehand,” she said.
Childhood asthma can be triggered by a number of factors, including smog, smoke, allergens like pollen, dust, mold and pet dander.
Knowing where in the region these hospitalizations are taking place is the first step to understanding why they’re happening, said Aditya Chakraborty, assistant professor at ODU’s Joint School of Public Health.
“We plan to use local hospitalization data and use the geographical hotspot analysis to see where childhood asthma hospitalizations are concentrated across Hampton Roads and Western Tidewater, and to explore what might be contributing to those patterns,” he said.
The study will use multiple AI models to analyze hospitalization data from Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters. The data will be anonymized using only patients’ zip codes, Parrott said. The models will also use data like demographic information, average age of homes, income levels and healthcare providers in the area, she noted.
Researchers hope the results will help healthcare providers and community partners know where to focus resources to improve treatment for childhood asthma.
“Imagine a child who's already had several asthma-related visits,” Chakraborty said. “If we can develop and validate a tool that helps a primary care team recognize when a child might need closer follow up, the team could reach out sooner.”
Parrott said she expects access to care to be a major contributing factor to the high hospitalization rates.
“We see that regularly with our free clinic that we run with ODU, because kids, even if they have insurance and they have a provider, they often can't even get into their provider,” she said, noting that having data to show the scale and scope of the issue would help providers know how to address it.
“If there's an access to care issue, are we able to take our clinics there, where they do community care?” Parrott said. “Are we able to work with the school nurses in that area? Can we provide enhanced asthma education to those that have asthma?”
The project builds on a study Chakraborty published in July. He used different machine learning models to see how well they could identify which children were reported to still have asthma, based on information such as when they last used asthma medication, date of last symptom and if they have rugs or carpet in their bedroom. It found that predictive models could improve early diagnoses of childhood asthma which could lead to earlier treatment.
“Our next step with the CHKD is to bring those methods closer to home,” Chakraborty said.
Chakraborty and Parrott are still in the process of collecting data and getting necessary approvals to move forward. Once the project has the green light, Chakraborty said things will move quickly. He expects to have the results sometime in 2027.
