Last January we announced that patientMpower had been awarded national-level funding from the UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) Healthcare scheme to support research into a new digitally enabled model of care for patients with lung transplant.
One year later it’s time to update you on progress!
The project planned was a prospective, randomised controlled trial comparing the clinical and health economic outcomes of a digitally-enabled hybrid model of care versus standard care in the follow-up of patients after lung transplantation.
Twelve months on the project is no longer just a plan on paper; we’re delighted to report that the trial is fully underway at NHS Manchester University Foundation Trust.
The project successfully completed ethics approval in September last year and patient recruitment is now almost two-thirds completed. The development of a bespoke patient questionnaire, to remotely capture information normally assessed as part of clinic-based reviews, has been completed and implemented on the patientMpower platform. Furthermore, integration between the patientMpower platform and the EPIC electronic medical record system used at Manchester is in the final stages of implementation.
The trial will now continue until all patients complete the six-months of follow up, and we look forward to sharing the study outcomes in due course.
Whilst the aim of the project is to examine the benefits of using patientMpower’s remote monitoring technology to enable a “right-time, right place” approach to care for lung transplant patients, it’s expected that learnings can also inform the wider implementation of digitally-enabled care across other chronic respiratory disease pathways.
A massive thank you to the patients involved in this study, our collaborators at Manchester NHS Foundation Trust and University College London for their ongoing work, and the team at SBRI for their support.
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