Felip Burgos
Hospital Clinic Barcelona, Spain
Title: High Quality Spirometry across the Healthcare System
Biography
Biography: Felip Burgos
Abstract
Extensive deployment of eHealth services is showing enormous potential to generate efficiencies in healthcare. In a previous research, we demonstrated enhanced quality of forced spirometry (FS) in Primary Care (PC). Recently, the Master Plan for Respiratory Diseases in Catalonia has consolidated further developments including different services supported by Information and Communication Technologies aiming at ensuring high quality spirometry (HQS) and interoperability at regional level, namely: i) generation of standards to transfer FS data (HL7-XML) across the system; ii) deployment of web-based support to PC and Community Pharmacists (CPh); and, iii) assessment of an algorithm for automatic Quality Control (QC) of the tests. We explored 1894 subjects from 15 PC and 1456 subjects from 100 CPh. The percentage of HQS in PC increased from 58% to 78% during a follow-up period. Similarly, the CPh study showed on average 70% HQS. Validation of the algorithm for automatic QC was carried out with 778 curves from 291 patients. The score produced by an expert professional and that automatically generated through the algorithm (Sensitivity 96%; Specificity 95%). We conclude that our results foster extensive adoption of strategies to facilitate interoperability of HQS tests at regional level facilitating information sharing across the system that reduce testing duplicities and generate healthcare efficiencies. Currently, the scheme is being generalized to other diagnostic/therapeutic procedures such as management of obstructive sleep apnoea. The study facilitates future strategies addressing early diagnosis, enhanced management and long-term follow-up of chronic respiratory patients.