Sonali Bose, MD: Respiratory Care and Research at Mount Sinai

As comorbidities and associations linking other conditions to asthma continue to be explored in clinical settings, facilities and practices are better off treating patients with a team-based approach across multiple disciplinaries. Such an approach has been embraced by the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. Sonali Bose, MD, an assistant professor at the system's Icahn School of Medicine detailed to MD Magazine how Mount Sinai has collaborated and initiated new means of addressing respiratory health issues.

MD Magazine: What practices have been adopted at Mount Sinai to improve patient respiratory health care?

Sonali Bose, MD: We're happy to announce that Mount Sinai has partnered up with National Jewish Health from Colorado to establish an independent health facility called the Mount Sinai National Jewish Respiratory Institute. And by doing that, we've hoped to allow for more specialty care in respiratory disease. One of the efforts that's been made has been allowing more resources to be available for patients particularly with asthma.

I'm one of a few asthma providers there and one of the things that I've found to be very beneficial has been the partnerships within our institution, specifically with ear, nose, and throat specialists and allergists to allow for a multidisciplinary approach in the way that we care for our asthma patients. We've been able to incorporate various technologies and different equipment, in order to better assess what's been going on in both the upper and lower airways to help us provide a more targeted approach to some of the things that might be making their asthma worse.

We're also very grateful to have access to some of the environmental components that are important in asthma management, and teaming up with pharmacists and nurses has been very useful for patients to feel like they can reach out and address their concerns about their drugs and how they're using them as well. So I think the newly established respiratory institute has been a very nice platform to allow patients to have a more comprehensive degree of asthma care.

What research has been undertaken by Mount Sinai to advance clinical understanding in the field of respiratory health?

Mount Sinai has speared a number of research initiatives recently to advance our clinical understanding of how to approach asthma, and this has spanned the life course. We are very active in research to look at prenatal exposures and environmental exposures very early in life that can predispose children to developing asthma and other respiratory outcomes. This has been a huge initiative over the last few years.

We have also an active field of research that has partnered up with different drug companies to see how different therapeutics might be useful in managing patients that we see. And this has spanned across the board — not just asthma, but a lot of other respiratory diseases. We're fortunate to have put together a team that has been quite cross-disciplinary from the other fields to try to get a more diverse understanding of this. We have researchers in the microbiome, we have exposure scientists, we have a number of implementation scientists as well, that have all worked together to understand in a more global way, what are the things we can do to improve asthma.