Asthma action plans help sufferers manage their conditions – St. Catharines Standard

Asthma action plans help sufferers manage their conditions
St. Catharines Standard
Asthma experts coast to coast have long promoted the use of asthma action plans, or AAPs. The simple one-page, go-to information sheets provide asthma sufferers with help on how to manage their condition, particularly if symptoms seem to be worsening.

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Wiki as an Innovative New tool for Developing individual Asthma Action Plans

Rather than give you a set of instructions about what to do if you have an Asthma attack, what if your doctor invites you to help write them?

Would that make patients feel more engaged and empowered in managing their health care, and would that ultimately make them happier if not healthier?

These questions are being raised by Dr. Samir Gupta, a respirologist at St. Michael’s Hospital.

His research has found that a wiki – a website developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content – can be an innovative new tool for developing individual asthma action plans.

“We’ve introduced a new way of getting patients engaged in developing tools that might improve their health,” Dr. Gupta said. “We’re empowering patients, involving patients in the health care process.”

Dr. Gupta said a lot of asthma action plans – a one-page set of instructions for managing a patient’s asthma – are developed by experts without input from patients or the clinics that distribute them. When they are difficult to read or understand, patients don’t follow them, especially these days when health care providers face competition from such things as the Internet and iPad apps for patients’ attention.

He got together a group of respirologists, patients, family doctors and asthma educators, set up a wiki and allowed them to choose their own content, fonts, colour and design for an asthma action plan. There were also voting mechanisms to select choices and a blog to explain them. Participants could log on as often as they wanted.

He said the results were collaborative and without the frequent hierarchical issues that can define the patient-doctor relationship.

“People were very engaged,” he said. “People logged on regularly and all the time. There were lots of comments, lots of rich discussion. The end results were highly useful.”

Dr. Gupta said this method of decision-making could be used in other medical fields, as well as in marketing, where consumers could have a role.

Dr. Gupta’s study on wikis for asthma action plans appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Asthma Plans Shouldn’t Affect Payments, Study Finds – BusinessWeek


HealthNewsDigest.com

Asthma Plans Shouldn't Affect Payments, Study Finds
BusinessWeek
Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) — A common measure of how well hospitals treat children and teens with asthma is statistically meaningless and shouldn't be used to determine federal quality payments under the health-care law, a study found.
Hospital asthma grades not linked to healthier kidsReuters
Relevance of Kids' Asthma Care Measure QuestionedMedPage Today
Asthma Care Measures Don't Reflect Outcomes in ChildrenFamily Practice News Digital Network
Doctors Lounge –HealthNewsDigest.com
all 20 news articles »

View full post on asthma – Google News

Asthma Home-Care Plans Shouldn’t Affect Payments, Study Finds – BusinessWeek


HealthNewsDigest.com

Asthma Home-Care Plans Shouldn't Affect Payments, Study Finds
BusinessWeek
Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) — A common measure of how well hospitals treat children and teens with asthma is statistically meaningless and shouldn't be used to determine federal quality payments under the health-care law, a study found.
Relevance of Kids' Asthma Care Measure QuestionedMedPage Today
Asthma Care Measures Don't Reflect Outcomes in ChildrenFamily Practice News Digital Network
For Kids With Asthma Flu Season Is More DangerousHealthNewsDigest.com
EurekAlert (press release) –Journal of American Medical Association (subscription)
all 10 news articles »

View full post on asthma – Google News