Our overall goal is to identify risk factors in people with asthma for being hospitalized for COVID-19. Our team is uniquely positioned to quickly analyze pre-existing data that includes risk factors likely to be relevant for people with asthma who are hospitalized for COVID-19. Our team has used a claims data set that includes 200+ million people residing in the US in multiple studies in people with asthma called OptumLabs Database Warehouse (OLDW). We hypothesize that there are behavior, health care delivery, and patient demographic factors associated with hospitalization for COVID-19 in people with asthma. To test this hypothesis, we will analyze pre-existing data from OLDW, testing the following independent variables: age, sex, race-ethnicity, smoking, comorbid chronic diseases, geographic region, rural/urban residence, access to provider care (traditional and telehealth), medication-filling behavior, and types of asthma medications filled.
The main goal for this project is to identify reasons that people with asthma are hospitalized for COVID-19. Finding people who are at highest risk for bad outcomes with COVID-19 infection will allow us to develop strategies to keep them as safe as possible.
