Healthy Hoops is an innovative asthma management program that uses basketball as a platform to teach children with asthma and their families how to proactively manage the disease through proper nutrition, exercise, and medication use. The program was created in 2003 by Keystone Mercy Health Plan, and launched in the Philadelphia area. Over the past seven years, program participants have shown an increase in the use of preventive medications, and a decrease in ER visits, hospitalizations, nocturnal awakenings, and the use of rescue medication. Healthy Hoops has expanded within Pennsylvania and nationally to South Carolina and Kentucky and Indiana. To date, more than 8,000 children with asthma, their parents, and siblings have participated in the Healthy Hoops Program.
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