The CAPTURE Questionnaire employs five questions to support the identification of individuals experiencing COPD symptoms who can benefit from further diagnostic testing and health care support. CAPTURE questions focus on environmental exposure; quality of breathing in relation to external factors; breathing during everyday activities; fatigue; and loss of productivity related to respiratory problems. This research examined whether the CAPTURE tool could help to identify symptomatic individuals with mild-to-moderate COPD...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently imposed their 2020 penalties on more than 2,500 hospitals across the United States for failing to reduce their 30-day readmission rates across a variety of penalizable conditions. This means that 83% of non-exempt hospitals will receive a lower payment for each Medicare ...

This International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease article examines the relationships between 30-day COPD readmissions and 1) multi-morbidities (defined as having two or more diseases at the same time), 2) sex and 3) type of insurance. The authors used several accepted health care data sets to extract relevant variables across nine U.S. states. When individual patient characteristics such as age and type of insurance are taken into account, researchers identified the following...

This one-hour webinar provides and in-depth introduction to the COPD Foundation's Pocket Consultant Guide (PCG) App track for patients and caregivers. This recording contains an overview of the evolution of the PCG from printed tri-fold card for healthcare professionals to app as well as the 2018 development and launch of a patient-specific track within the app.

This dual-perspective article provides one impacted individual’s experience with COPD exacerbations as well as impressions of a respiratory physician. John Linnell, the patient author and a COPD Foundation state captain, shares his early disease experience and its progression, which for some time did not include severe flare-ups...

A new study, the first of its kind done in Norway, analyzed whether people with COPD receive treatment consistent with GOLD recommendations, comparing those recently hospitalized with those not experiencing a hospitalization. Many studies have found that adherence to treatment guidelines is a challenge for people with COPD, often because they are not offered all available care. This study showed similar results...

Project ACHIEVE is funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and aims to identify which care transition elements are most important to patients and caregivers, what efforts are being implemented across the United States, and finally, which of these programs is producing successful outcomes for patients. In this webinar, Project ACHIEVE key contributors provide details on progress and analysis related to their care transitions research efforts...

The 2018 Readmissions Institute Toolkit was initially designed for the March 2017 Connecticut Readmissions Institute in New Haven, CT and updated for the July 2018 Chicago Readmissions Institute. This PDF version...

The COPD Foundation’s Stephanie Williams, BS, RRT, participated in the American Association for Respiratory Care’s (AARC) “Big Ideas Theater” to discuss end of life decisions. She explained...

In this commentary, the authors propose additional safeguards for studies listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, an online registry administered by the National Institutes of Health...

This Joint Commissions Sentinal Event Alert focuses on ineffective communication in the patient handoff process, whether within or between healthcare organizations. A longstanding issue that providers and administrators have sought to address, suboptimal handoffs due to inadequate...

This study of 2,662 COPD patients employed a retrospective cohort design to assess the predictive accuracy of the LACE index, a tool used to predict 30-day readmissions and mortality. In this study, the primary outcomes were 1) readmission within 30 days and death during stay...

This article presents the methodology and findings of a retrospective cohort study conducted in Michigan, a state with some of the highest rates of COPD in the United States. The aims of the analysis were to examine readmission in COPD patients who came through the emergency department (ED) and predictors of length of stay for those readmitted...

In this study, researchers developed a predictive model of death without readmission and readmission in a cohort of 2,417 COPD patients hospitalized with an acute exacerbation. The final model included the following factors:

This article describes research recently conducted to develop a simple and straightforward COPD screening questionnaire for use in primary care. With the input of COPD patients, the authors developed and tested a five-item questionnaire that included questions about...