
Prompt and effective treatment with maintenance therapy is critical to helping COPD patients manage their condition, but researchers from the South Texas Veterans Health Care System and Connecticut-based pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim Inc. found that many patients aren’t getting the care they need.
In a study published in BMC Pulmonary Medicine, researchers used patient data obtained from the Inovalon Insights database collected between January 2015 and December 2021 to follow the patient journey beginning with the initial diagnosis. The database was chosen because it is representative of the insured U.S. population, including those with commercial, Medicaid Managed Care and Medicare Advantage.
The cohort ultimately included data from more than 238,000 patients with COPD, with roughly half of those being females with a mean age of 63 years. The majority of the patients had Medicaid (either Managed Care or Advantage) as their primary insurance.
During the four-year period studied, 32.9% of the patients had at least one moderate or severe exacerbation. At the time of diagnosis, 86.2% of the patients were untreated and had no long-acting therapies, no short-acting reliever medication or no treatment at all. What’s more, 63.8% of them remained untreated at the end of the four-year follow-up period.
Long-acting maintenance treatment, the researchers wrote, is recommended by current guidelines to help optimize lung function, reduce exacerbations and improve quality of life. That the patients were not receiving these treatments, “suggests a lack of compliance with recommended guidelines and an opportunity to further improve patient care,” said the study authors. “Understanding the reasons behind the noted prescribing patterns in this study would be essential for improving the quality of life and overall patient journey of patients newly diagnosed with COPD.”