Date of Award

Summer 8-17-2026

Degree Type

Open Access Capstone

Community Engaged/Serving

Part of the UMass Boston Community-Engaged Teaching, Research, and Service Series. //scholarworks.umb.edu/engage

Keywords

Asthma, Pediatric Asthma, Equity Gap

Abstract

Asthma morbidity is disproportionately high for preschool-age children (2-5 years) in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan neighborhoods of Boston owing to poor housing conditions and a lack of coordination between housing remediation and healthcare systems. Data at the neighborhood level indicate rates of (0-17) emergency department visits as high as 144.1 per 10,000 in Mattapan, compared to 15.0 per 10,000 in West Roxbury, where Black children have emergency department visit rates that are 6.9 times more than the rates for White Children across the city (Boston Public Health Commission, 2023). Additionally, Community Health Worker (CHW)-led home visiting with environmental trigger remediation, modeled after Boston Children’s Hospital’s Community Asthma Initiative, is an effective cost-saving intervention. This paper argues that implementing a housing referral pathway integrated into the EHR, built on existing hospital infrastructure, and expanded to be activated during primary care visits, along with MassHealth reimbursement for CHW home visits to maintain the program beyond grant funding, would help reduce recurring preventable asthma-related health contacts.

Comments

Free and open access to this work is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this work through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the “Off-Campus Users” button.

Download

  Contact Author

Share

COinS