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Dagmar Frias of Longwood, Bronx says she went through one of those "shock of life" moments when she had to rush her daughter, Amelia Marquez, to the hospital after the infant went into a severe asthma attack.

"I have four kids. None of them have ever been asthmatic or came out not even with a tight chest in the middle of a severe flu," says Frias. "So to have my little girl -- not only my only girl, but my little baby -- go through this, and she was so little. I mean, it's a scary moment."

Without the right care or treatment plan, health experts say it could have triggered the first in a series of frantic, costly, repeat emergency visits.

According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly nine million children across the country suffer from asthma. It is it a leading caused of missed school days, the most common cause of hospitalization for children under age 14 and the source of massive health care costs.

But a new study from the Children's Health Fund and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health shows hospitalizations and emergency room visits can be drastically reduced with strict adherence to what's come to be known as "best practice" guidelines established by the National Institutes of Health.

In a nutshell, the most cost-effective, preventive plan to get children better faster and keep them out of the hospital can translate into major reimbursement and out-of-pocket savings.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, the president of the Children's Health Fund and the professor of population and family health at the Mailman School, says the savings really add up.

"If you do it right from the outpatient or clinic point of view, you can save more than $4,000 per child with asthma per year," says Redlener. "Even if we have to invest money to make sure kids are getting the proper outpatient care, there's so much savings on the back end that it makes it an extremely useful intervention."

Frias and her husband found that kind of intervention for their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Amelia through the Health Fund's New York program that operates in partnership with Montefiore Medical Center. Through the program, they have been able to keep her from returning to the hospital.

"Asthma is a very individual disease, so it's really important for kids to have what we call a 'medical home,'" says Dr. Delaney Gracy, a pediatrician. "If they come to the same place over time and see a team they know, we can really understand their individual asthma and we can tailor a program and a treatment plan that works exactly for them."

For providers, that means potentially seeing a smaller volume of patients and spending more time asking questions and educating them, something that Redlener points out more are incentivized to do with the implementation of health care reform.

In terms of controlling costs, Redlener says studies like theirs are proof that it can be done.