By Barbara L. Massoudi, RTI International, BreathEasy Principal Investigator.
The link between asthma, depression and anxiety has stymied medical researchers for some time. Despite several studies, it’s really unclear which comes first. The mechanism for the interaction between these two conditions is also a mystery – is it behavioral, environmental, or biological? No one really knows.
Managing these conditions
What we do know is that for people with asthma, managing their condition on a daily basis can be challenging. There are several different types of medications that can be taken and avoiding triggers is an important thing to do as well. Triggers are usually things that we all commonly encounter on a daily basis such as animal dander, pollen, smoke, cold air, even physical activity. Add to all this a condition like depression or anxiety that typically makes people less energetic and less likely to be able to do things to care for themselves. The interaction of the two conditions can lead to a vicious cycle, affecting the quality of life for patients.
The BreathEasy project
This difficulty in self-management and the impact on quality of life is exactly why we decided to tackle this complicated set of conditions through our project. Researchers at RTI International, a non-profit research organization and the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Family Medicine have teamed up to develop a PHR application to assist people with asthma and depression or anxiety. To develop the tool, we’ll work with about 35 adult patients with asthma and depression or anxiety, recruited from the patient populations served by two primary care clinics in Richmond, VA – the Nelson Clinic and the Hayes E. Willis Health Center. The PHR tool will help these patients track observations of daily living (ODLs) related to their conditions. ODLs can be things that you do everyday – such as taking a medication, or things that you feel – like shortness of breath or a sad mood, as well as objective measures of lung function like peak flows. The importance of capturing the ODLs is that they could hold the key to sorting out an individual’s personal experience with triggers, meds, and symptoms, but they don’t occur in the doctor’s office where they can easily be observed. These are things that occur out in the world, in the course of everyday life, and generally speaking, people aren’t very good at recalling things they do, even on a daily basis. The PHR tool will offer a way to capture and display this information in a way that will be informative to the patients and hopefully, clinically relevant to their health care providers.
The project team
As the principal investigator, I’m working with co-PI, Dr. Steve Rothemich from VCU as well as Dr. Alex Krist, another physician in the Department of Family Medicine. The RTI team consists of Bill Savage who will develop the patient application for the Android-based phone, Mike Zmuda, who will build the clinician dashboard, Sarah Cook, who will conduct focus groups and do usability testing with patients and clinicians to learn what features and tools they’d like the application to have, Rita Sembajwe, who will keep me on track with her project management skills, and develop a newsletter for patients, and Lucia Rojas-Smith, who will design an evaluation to measure the impact of the tool on patients, clinicians, quality of care, patient-clinician communications, etc.
We hope you'll visit our webpage for BreathEasy updates and follow our progress through the blog!
Primary Health care centers of the National Guard Health Affairs have access to Family Medicine back up on the campus and in the Hospital. The Department is sharing a significant work load by classifying patients in routine management and specialty referrals. Pre-employment check up, and annual evidence based screening services are the key provisions., to learn more please enter her
Posted by: Department of Family Medicine | May 22, 2010 at 03:40 AM