HISTORY OF IMPACT DC

IMPACT DC was founded in the fall of 2001 with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Our original missions were (and still are) to perform surveillance of pediatric emergency department visits for acute asthma exacerbations and to design and implement an intervention to address the problem in the District of Columbia. These efforts culminated in the creation of the IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic, a novel asthma follow-up care source physically located in the Emergency Department at Children’s National Medical Center.

IMPACT DC has grown to include several other activities. We serve as one of the 10 sites of the Inner City Asthma Consortium (ICAC), which studies immune-based asthma therapies in children and young adults. We collaborate with the Center for Genomic Medicine of the Children’s Research Institute on the AsthMap Project, which is an effort to characterize the genotypes and phenotypes of more than 1000 asthmatic children in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Finally, we are collaborating with local inner-city pharmacies to study the effect of enhanced asthma education by community pharmacists.