Many patients in the USA with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) do not receive the recommended levels of care, researchers have found.
Appropriate disease management has been shown to reduce illness, disability and death rates from asthma and COPD, but it is not clear to what extent patients receive the recommended levels of care, say Dr Richard Mularski, from Kaiser Permanente Northwest in Portland, Oregon, USA, and colleagues.
To investigate, the researchers studied the medical records of, and conducted a telephone survey with, 260 patients with asthma and 169 with COPD.
In all, just 55% of the participants received the recommended levels of care.
Asthma patients received 54% of the recommended levels of care, at 67% for routine care and 48% for exacerbation management. Meanwhile, COPD patients received 58% of the recommended levels of care, at 46% for routine care and 60% for exacerbation management.
“The deficits and variability in the quality of care for obstructive lung disease present ample opportunity for quality improvement,” Dr Mularski and colleagues write in the journal Chest.
“To begin to improve the deficits identified in this study, broad-based and widely available evaluation of healthcare processes is required,” the researchers add.
They suggest that care could be improved by “increasing the use of information technology, increasing quality improvement and continuous assessment, better chronic disease management, improved care coordination [and] establishing performance measures with active monitoring”.