BOSTON – Remote monitoring of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) use with feedback messaging to patients improves adherence but only when patients opt to receive continual feedback on their usage, according to a study.
Dennis Hwang, MD, medical director of Kaiser Permanent Fontana Medical Center in California and his colleagues designed the four-arm Tele-OSA study to evaluate the impact of two automated telemedicine interventions: an obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) education program (provided by Emmi Solutions) and a CPAP remote monitoring system with automated patient feedback (U-Sleep, ResMed). Dr. Hwang, who is also cochair of sleep medicine at Southern California Permanente Medical Group, presented his findings at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
Debra L. Beck/Frontline Medical News
Dr. Dennis Hwang
CPAP adherence was compared at 3 months and 1 year for patients in all four groups. Dr. Hwang reported findings from 556 patients who completed one-year follow-up.
At 90 days, patients assigned to either of the telemonitoring arms had significantly higher CPAP usage than those who did not receive telemonitoring.
However, at 3 months when the study protocol called for the automated messaging to be turned off, CPAP adherence dropped off. By 8 months, adherence in patients using the telemonitoring system was no different from that in those who never received the automated messaging. That would have been the end of the story, except that there was a glitch in the system.
“Perhaps serendipitously, we had a group of patients, about one-third, for whom we inadvertently did not turn off the messaging,” explained Dr. Hwang. “In these patients who continued to receive feedback, CPAP usage remained elevated throughout the course of the year and, at 12 months, was significantly higher than in the patients who were not receiving any kind of messaging.”
Dr. Hwang added that the telemonitoring required no additional provider intervention, “suggesting that this could be a cost-effective strategy.”
Only one-third of patients (66.7%) assigned to one of the tele-education groups viewed the video. Additionally, the researchers found that, whether patients used the tele-education alone or in combination with the telemonitoring, tele-education use had no impact on 90-day compliance with CPAP.
Dr. Hwang received support from the American Sleep Medicine Foundation and ResMed Science.