Increased adaptation on many levels:
For a long time, studies have shown that patients living with chronic diseases can experience a process of behavioral, functional, and psycho-social adaptation to their limitations over time. Most people breathe an average of 22,000 times per day. We do not think about breathing often – it would be impossible for us to work on anything else if breathing involved conscious effort. In particular, with asthma and COPD, most people develop sub-conscious adaptations to accommodate for decreased breathing capacity, to the point where they may be insensitive to changes in breathing that may alert them to worsening conditions.
Asthma – Expensive, No Meaningful Movement in Outcomes:
With 25 million Americans suffering from Asthma, there’s much more that our healthcare system needs to do to help.
A critical component of optimizing asthma control is the engagement of patients as active participants in their asthma management. Motivated and well-informed patients can assume a great deal of control over their asthma care, but few have even received basic asthma education. In fact, education on asthma self-management (ASME) is part of the CDC’s 6|18 Initiative, targeting six common and costly health conditions with 18 proven interventions., Several studies involving diverse cohorts, including Medicaid and Medicare populations, have shown that patient education decreases hospitalizations, minimizes asthma exacerbations, and improves daily function.,, However, programs requiring frequent, in-person consultations are not scalable and have continuously failed to engage an adequate number of patients to have a broad-based impact.
