Now available: New COPD virtual patient tour debuts at CHEST 2021

A new virtual patient tour (VPT)—COPD Unmet Needs: The Patient Perspective—made its debut at CHEST 2021 and is now available to all CHEST members.

VPTs allow participants the opportunity to walk in a patient’s shoes and understand their challenges and concerns as expert faculty guide them through real-life cases, including videos of patients.

This new COPD VPT will help clinicians provide individualized, clinically supported, guideline-based patient care, drawing from the GOLD Report for COPD, according to Matthew Hegewald, MD, FCCP, Professor of Medicine, Intermountain Healthcare and the University of Utah, and lead faculty for the VPT.

“In this virtual patient tour, we introduce a case, then we actually transition to the patient’s home, where we really focus on the patient’s perspective of their symptoms, their activities, and their limitations,” Dr. Hegewald said. “This gives clinicians a unique opportunity to explore patient experiences when they face unmet medical needs regarding their COPD management.”

During the VPT, faculty will:

• Review how COPD can impact a patient’s quality of life, their ability to perform activities of daily living, and ultimately, impact health outcomes.
• Review topics from the GOLD Report that will allow physicians to provide individualized, clinically supported, evidence-based patient care.
• Review appropriate therapy escalation, steroid use, and the impact of multiple inhaler therapy on adherence.

“This is a real-life patient, and the participants get to experience their challenges and the way that the disease affects their lives,” Dr. Hegewald said. “We discuss evaluation and management steps to maximize symptom improvement and minimize complications using evidence-based practices.”

COPD Unmet Needs is a nonpromotional, non-CME disease-state educational program brought to you by CHEST in collaboration with and paid for by GSK.