Asthma
Use Living With Asthma to improve patient self-management, save clinical time and reduce over-prescription of SABA
Too many asthma patients are being over-prescribed SABA inhalers, which is associated with an increased risk of harm (multiple studies), increased costs, and a significant carbon footprint as most SABA inhalers are pressurised inhalers (pMDIs).
What’s more, the failure to manage the patients’ symptoms of breathlessness leads to a failure to improve their symptom burden.
The limited capacity in face-to-face respiratory physiotherapy services, combined with traditional approaches to patient management in those services—infrequent, 3 monthly and F2F or video based sessions that poorly engage patients—means that the problems are not being resolved.
Solution
Living With Asthma enables clinicians to distribute new exercises to their patients and monitor their patients’ condition remotely at any time. Patient self-management is also improved by them:
- becoming more informed about their condition
- setting medication reminders
- keeping peak-flow diaries
- doing specialist breathing exercises
- completing PROMs
Expected benefits
- Reduction in demand on primary care—lower numbers of appointments requested for unexplained breathlessness, and lower numbers for complications of SABA overuse.
- Improved patient experience and health through short, regular, remote therapist reviews in a manner convenient to patients, leading to better/sustainable patient self-management.
- Clinical time savings as average weekly patient reviews are only 3 minutes.
- Reduction in the inhaler-associated emissions from SABA over-prescription (3% of NHS).
