Impact of Population Management Strategies on Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Adherence

Untreated obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) increases patient risks and burden on the healthcare system due to its high prevalence, impact on cardiovascular health, and daytime symptoms that cause deficits on daytime functioning. The yearly economic cost of OSA in Australia, with a population of about 25 million, is estimated to be $21 billion. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy on improving patient and population outcomes is limited by suboptimal adherence with literature generally reporting adherence rates of 50-70% (defined by Medicare as ≥70% nights used ≥4 hours). The development of technology-based solutions is critical towards improving adherence, and this includes the use of remote patient monitoring, automation, and population management tools. Current CPAP devices are now wirelessly connected (eg, via cellular) which enables remote access by sleep medicine providers to access patient usage. Fox et al demonstrated the utility of remote monitoring in a randomized trial. New CPAP users that were remotely identified to have suboptimal use (and underwent a telephone encounter with a sleep medicine provider) showed significantly better 3 month CPAP use compared to the control group without monitoring (321 minutes versus 207 minutes; p<0.0001). Our center also performed a randomized trial (Tele-OSA study) in which a similar process was applied but the monitoring and patient feedback was automated. Patients with <4 hours use for 3 nights in a row were automatically sent messages (typically via SMS text) encouraging use. The investigators demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of this automated approach (Auto-Monitoring), which resulted in improved CPAP adherence without an increase in manual intervention with a provider.

Population management platforms capable of automatically risk stratifying patients (eg, automatically identifying poor users) may be another cost-effective technology-based tool by enabling a "management by exception" (MBE) follow-up process. This process concentrates provider effort on patients most at need by allowing providers to passively observe successful users and actively intervene only in CPAP strugglers. In our center, the investigators intend to implement this population management process by identifying CPAP strugglers at 1 month, 2 month, and 3 months after therapy initiation although impact on outcomes is unknown.

Time Motion Pilot

Our center proceeded with a preliminary implementation of this automated MBE process and performed a time motion study comparing time required to deliver care utilizing the population management process with automated risk stratification versus a non-automated process. The tasks performed were as follows: 1) Risk stratification (identifying patients with moderate-severe OSA), assessing CPAP Adherence (identifying those with >50% nights used at least 4 hours), telephone encounter (to troubleshoot issues with CPAP use), and documentation. The investigators demonstrated an 83% reduction in time required to follow-up a similar population of new CPAP users at any given time point (eg, 1 month, 2 months, etc.) While the results of this pilot (unpublished data) demonstrates significant improvement in care delivery efficiency, the impact on adherence remains unclear.

Population Management Study