Increase Cost of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Reducing The Cost of COPD Treatment
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Reducing The Cost of COPD Treatment
Proposed Solution
The solution proposed is based on reducing the medical cost of COPD. The solution is the improvement of COPD health care management. As suggested by the COPD Foundation (2014), the skyrocketing cost of COPD treatment globally is due to hospitalizations due to readmissions and complication. The key problem is preventable through an enactment of better COPD management to curb readmissions and associated complications (COPD Foundation, 2014). Enhancing management of COPD, like any other chronic disease, decreases the cost and improves the effectiveness of service delivery. The proposal revolves around the notion that better COPD care has the potential to decrease avoidable costs, results in patients feeling better and consequently reduces readmissions cases that WHO estimated to contribute to 49% of COPD treatment expenditure in the US (WHO, 2014). The choice of decreasing cost through enhancing COPD management is after the analysis of the COPD Foundation statistics that despite COPD being the third causal agent of death in the US, it receives less attention from health care practitioners.
Implementation Plan
Current Situation
COPD is ranked among the leading chronic diseases responsible for prevalent mortality and morbidity in the health care arena. COPD has imposed a financial and economic burden to health facilities due to the cost of readmission. In the year 2013, CDC ranked COPD as the third leading cause of mortality in the US, with an approximated direct and indirect cost of attending it being $50 billion (Mapel & Schum, 2010). Out of the total costs, the cost of patient readmissions constitutes 45% of the budget, while the rest is shared by related complication and first-time treatment. The treatment and diagnosis of victims affected by COPD in the US and globally continue to pose a burden, challenges, and problems that threatens the health care delivery systems (Mannino & Homa, 2012). The problem results from the lack of coordinated and integrated patient management model with a well-noted absence of effective follow-up care between different levels of COPD care. The rates of readmission can be reduced through having a home-based COPD management model that is based on telehealth to reduce the chances of patients returning for checks, which contributes to congestion. According to CDC, 75% percent of healthcare professional are not ready for the emerging roles of nursing such as telehealth that could be used to manage patients while at their homes (Sullivan, 2014). The acute challenge is also caused by the shortage of medical staff that reduces the quality of COPD services delivered. The proposal is to have a coordinated set of COPD management protocol for ensuring effective delivery of services to reduce the prevalent cases of readmissions.
Proposed Plan
The plan entails the enhancement of the existing COPD management protocol by proposing some amendment and improvement. The plan will be based on four key cornerstones, which includes monitoring and assessment of the disease upon patient arrival to identify the level of the disease and categorize the based on treatment urgency. The other component of the plan is the introduction of telehealth strategies to manage patients while at the home, hence reduction of the present day readmission rates. The third component is the strategies that reduce the risk factors associated with COPD through community awareness campaigns against predisposing factors such as smoking and risk factors for asthma. The last element of the plan is to manage COPD at its stable level and COPD exacerbations.
Using the first component of the plan, COPD management in the hospital will involve a systematic approach starting from the creation of enough room that can accommodate consultation spaces, diagnosis, isolation of patients based on chronicity, treatment rooms, and patient-family interaction spaces. It is not to say the present treatment rooms are small, but the reported cases of COPD have caused congestion and COPD being inhalation-based disease, space is one of the most imperative aspects. The procedure should be routinized and assessment of the patient done regularly, to determine the fit patients, those to be referred to repeat the treatment cycle and the ones to be transferred home for telehealth treatment (Hui & Hewitt, 2013). The plan will ensure a coordination and a predictable patient management pattern that is routinized to give better results. The second part of the plan will be the consideration of telehealth to ease congestion. It will call for the training of nurses to fit for the contemporary role.
The plan also considers the risk factors of the disease that entail the use of social support, community awareness and counselling of the COPD patients about the predisposing factors of the disease, with smoking cessation being the most effective way to prevent the prevalence of the disease. According to Ward, Akers, Pinnuck and Williams (2010), the effective prevention of COPD is through the reduction of overall exposure to air pollutants both in outdoor and indoor basis, minimizing exposure to occupational dust and the cessation of smoking (Bolibar, 2009). There will be a recommendation in the counselling therapy session for the pharmacotherapies that will assist the patient to reduce tobacco dependence. The counselling session should be made compulsory in the treatment cycle proposed in the plan. The other plan component is the management of COPD exacerbations and stable COPD. It will be achieved through a stepwise increment in treatment that depends on the level of COPD. As proposed by Garcia-Aymerich and Hernandez (2008), the ability of patients to cope up with their health status and illness, health education is important in accomplishing certain goals such as the ability of the patients to stop smoking. The management exacerbations will be through effective use and timely availing of NIPPV for severe exacerbations so as to enhance blood PH and gases (Donaldson, Wilkinson, & Hurst, 2010). As suggested by Blackstock and Webst...