Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a preventable disease that is treatable through aggressive campaigns against cigarette smoking, pharmacotherapy, active physiological surveillance, and sustained healthy behavior.
COPD can negatively affect a person’s physical, psychological, and social well-being, impacting family relationships and social life. Feelings of suffocation, smoking addiction, increased anxiety, and a reduced ability to participate in family and social settings can all reduce the quality of daily life.
However, according to a 2019 study, having a positive mindset, accepting help, adopting a healthy lifestyle, and receiving continuous professional healthcare services are important strategies and practices to managing COPD.
Understanding Patient Needs
In addition to treatment protocols for COPD like smoking cessation and medication, patients need to be educated about COPD and provided a means to convey their needs, behaviors, and abilities to successfully self-manage.
Zyter employs a patient engagement methodology at the onset of a COPD program to systematically learn about the patient as a person, provide behavioral content, and allow for continuous activity feedback to the care team.
Sustained Engagement
Patients with COPD require corticosteroids in most cases and frequent surveillance of vitals combined with care management to maximize control of lung function and blood pressure. Daily activity and psychosocial surveillance and patient feedback are also critical to providing treatment.
ZyterHealth™ provides a platform to sustain patient engagement and develop the required self-management skills. Additionally, care management content and interventions, patient-specific guidance to both the person and care team, and remote patient monitoring using a spirometer, pulse-oximeter, and blood pressure monitor enables a plan and a path for treating COPD and the whole person.
How Zyter Helps
Avoiding COPD: Proactive Treatment
- Identification: Patient knowledge of affecting behaviors, ability to modify behaviors, and risks
- Smoking-specifically: Stop smoking and avoid second-hand smoke
- Patient Needs: Incorporating medical and psychosocial patient-reported needs in the treatment plan
- Engagement: Physiological, behavioral, and mental surveillance as a part of care management
- Medication: Corticosteroids and associated vitals and affects virtually monitored regularly
Treating COPD: Surveil and Modify
- Education: Patient-continued education on preventative behavior, discipline with medication and vital monitoring
- Surveillance: Monitoring lung capacity, blood pressure, and mental disposition and cognitive understanding
- Care Management: Multi-factor care plans for age, biometrics, activity, and medication adherence
- Engagement: Frequent system-generated engagement and care team involvement as a support mechanism
- Mental Health: Engaging social work, behavioral health; frequent assessment for anxiety and depression, plus social support tools
Overcoming Access to Care Challenges
The ability to provide access to virtual care can depend on multiple facets of financial, operational, and value-based influencers. A patient’s ability to access care, sustain it, and improve their quality of living is a direct outcome of those influencers.
Financial – Those who can benefit most from remote patient monitoring devices (DME, OTC, and wearables) often cannot afford them. As reimbursement may be available through Medicare, it is important for providers to understand all financial aspects of supporting a large RPM program prior to launch.
Operational – Providers understand the importance of RPM and telehealth, but care management staff is not sized to handle increased patient cohorts. Integration with the EMR is essential for treatment in a longitudinal record, but RPM data and insights are not easily actionable without requiring more time spent using technology.
Value-Based – Value-based care models are incentivized to demonstrate and sustain health outcomes. Small to large, rural to urban, health care’s mission is to foster improved health; without easy-to-use technology and devices, dismantling access disparities, and sustained patient engagement, “quick wins” are just as quickly lost.
Zyter helps solve these challenges to create access to care for treating COPD through:
- Competitive technology and services across the healthcare spectrum.
- EHR integration and actionable data for the provider and care team.
- Reducing the number of tools and “clicks” so staff can spend more time treating patients.
- Linking value with risk mitigation, health outcomes, and decreased expense (such as reducing avoidable ED visits and readmissions).
- Supporting behavioral change in patients through educational materials and easier access to care as well as providing virtual support, alerts, and reminders to physicians.
Patient Access to Care. Improved by Zyter.
Zyter ships a pre-configured wireless device to the patient’s home, outfitted with a simple on/off button. Spirometers and blood pressure cuffs are easy to use for patients of all ages and no technical knowledge is required. Because the devices are LTE-enabled, there is no need to connect them to Wi-Fi. All the patient has to do is turn on the Zyter device and follow the simple instructions in the user guide.
Zyter makes program-specific treatment and care plans easy to access on the app. Understanding activity, nutritional behaviors, and psychological and biological changes are essential for patients with COPD. Providers use custom or Zyter assessments to continue engaging patients without overwhelming them.
Zyter’s mobile app displays the most recent biometric results and date of each reading, as well as activity and nutrition from synced wearables. Patients can “Take a Health Exam” or “Schedule a Visit” from the app, and if necessary, securely chat with their physician.
Zyter Telehealth creates access to care with secure video for patients, providers, care teams, caregivers, and support services. Along with remote patient monitoring (RPM), Zyter Telehealth provides real-time imaging, biometrics, and virtual evaluation.
Zyter is continuing to innovate with health behavior reinforcement intelligence, using badges, reminders, and motivational messaging to help each patient with their personal health experience.
Zyter makes it easier to understand every patient as a unique individual. Zyter uses personalized care plans for RPM surveillance and notifications so the provider and team can customize what patients need to know when they need to know it.
Personalized Care. Delivered by Zyter.
Zyter integrates with the provider practice, hospital, and health system EHR. This makes it easy to provide access and facilitation for referrals, patients, and provider-to-provider interactions. The Zyter app can be embedded using iFrames for in-context, actionable treatment for patients being remotely monitored or needing telehealth services.
Timely alerts, clinical notes and references, urgent care and scheduled video visit flexibility within the provider and care team workflows boosts efficiencies so care teams can spend more time with patients.
Zyter technology makes virtual health data specific to how the provider needs to treat the patient. RPM biometrics are surveilled based on patient-specific thresholds, creating a unique care plan that can be modified as treatment progresses. Results are easily accessed in the EHR and the embedded Zyter provider app for ease-of-use.
Action plans, care plans, important numbers, and medication instructions are always available for the patient on their Zyter app. Providers can easily share educational content, social support direction, activity, and nutritional guidance, as well as health behavior content.
A vital component of achieving and sustaining value-based care is system-generated insights from RPM, patient health data, assessments, and clinical protocols. Providers using Zyter TruCare®, a suite of care management products, can gain operational efficiency over any demographic of population as they expand scale, interact with a health system, and establish a greater understanding of a patient’s health behavior, disparities, and support needs.
Zyter provides support in understanding virtual/ telehealth reimbursement and technology to help providers maximize their financial investment through engagement metrics and analysis.
Your Clinical Partner
Zyter is your clinical partner for improving and protecting health. We understand the healthcare delivery needs of doctors, nurses, and care teams, and can help your organization deploy value-based services to improve outcomes and lower cost.
