Feasibility of At-Home Handheld Spirometry

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) results in nearly 750,000 hospitalizations annually and is the third leading cause of "early" (within 30-day) hospital readmissions in the United States. Curbing preventable early readmissions for acute exacerbations of COPD (AECOPD) has become a national priority, as demonstrated by the Medicare Hospital Readmissions Reduction financial penalty program. One critical barrier in assessing readmission risk is the lack of an easily-measured 'vital sign' for COPD: accurate, timely measurements of lung function. Unlike other medical problems that have validated, easily-obtained measurements of organ function, COPD evaluation often defaults to patient report and physician evaluation without critical physiologic data. This lack of objective pulmonary function data during AECOPD in turn leads to critical errors in disease severity assessment. However, the required, repeated measurements by spirometry that can demonstrate responses to therapy can be time-consuming and expensive to perform in a laboratory, and both equipment and staffing infrastructure for bedside testing is cumbersome and often not prioritized. For these reasons, spirometry frequently is not done for patients with AECOPD.

To monitor patient responses to therapy and to assess risks based on objective measures, the investigators propose to the study the use of a portable, patient-driven device ("SpiroPD") that can be used in both in-patient and outpatient settings, and that reports (via the internet) values collected in real time. While the device has been used in the lung transplant community and for patients with cystic fibrosis, no studies have been done to validate its use in COPD. This protocol involves in-hospital patient training with the device followed by serial measurements at home in the first 30 days post hospital-discharge.

Demonstration in a pilot, single-center trial of the usefulness of real-time, repeated hand-held spirometry to provide objective measurements of lung function in AECOPD will have a substantial impact on both patient health outcomes and on health care utilization and will set the stage for appropriate next-step studies and NIH grant applications. It is unknown whether this specific technology will be acceptable in the target population, though previous research suggests that older patients may be more willing to use home monitoring technology. This multi-disciplinary research team includes providers from the Department of Medicine and the UCM COPD Readmissions Program team.