Pre/Post Pilot Test of VME for the Video vs. TTG Respiratory Inhaler Technique Assessment and InstructioN Study

Asthma and Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) results in over a million hospitalizations in the United States annually and COPD is the third leading cause of 30-day re-hospitalizations. Clinical trials have established the efficacy of treatments primarily dispensed via respiratory inhaler devices that reduce morbidity and health care utilization if they are used correctly. The effectiveness of these medications in real-world settings is limited by the fact that patients often do not use inhalers correctly. Current guidelines recommend assessing and teaching inhaler technique at all health care encounters, including hospitalization. Over 75% of hospitalized patients in an urban, predominantly underserved population misused their respiratory inhalers, highlighting a missed opportunity to educate these patients with high potential to benefit. Hospitalization, therefore, provides a potential 'teachable moment' to correct this misuse. My preliminary data indicate that one strategy, in-person teach-to-goal (TTG), is effective in teaching hospitalized patients proper inhaler technique and is more effective than simple verbal instruction. While TTG is a promising, several limitations prevent widespread adoption. TTG is time-consuming and costly. Also, reinforcement may be needed, which may be impractical with in-person TTG. One potential method to surmount TTG's limitations is use of interactive video module education (VME) that has the potential to be less costly, maintain fidelity, and be more easily extended into the post-discharge setting than in-person TTG. Before widespread implementation of VME, it is critical to rigorously develop and test VME for inhaler education in the hospital setting. Ultimately, it will also be important to understand patients' ability and willingness to use post-discharge VME for educational reinforcement to allow for this strategy to transition patients across care settings from hospital to home.

We hypothesize that interactive VME will lead to non-inferior rates of ability to demonstrate correct inhaler use compared to rates with TTG among hospitalized patients with Asthma or COPD.

For this study we are testing the preliminary efficacy of VME to teach respiratory inhaler technique prior to implementing a larger RCT to test the comparative effectiveness of VME versus TTG.