Boehringer looks to enhance COPD care with new registry

Boehringer Ingelheim and Optimum Patient Care are launching a new patient registry, APEX COPD (Advancing the Patient Experience in COPD), to better understand the disease and how it can be treated in primary care offices.

Boehringer said the registry will be the first-of-its-kind, specifically designed to improve the management of patients with COPD, all in the primary care setting, and “reflects the reality of the COPD patient experience”.

It will report findings and insights to be shared in academic journals and medical congresses. In addition, the registry will provide real-time, patient-reported information as well as relevant information from the electronic medical record (EMR) in a structured format to physicians at the point-of-care. This information will aid physicians in making a clinical judgment.

The registry, which will eventually enroll 3,000 patients who are being treated by a primary care physician, will retrospectively and prospectively collect EMR data for patients and supplement these data through patient-reported information.

Professor David Price, founder and CEO of Optimum Patient Care, said: “This initiative is unique from other COPD initiatives in the fact that it will combine patient-reported information with EMR data at the point-of-care.

“One of our big aims is to integrate this information and present it to clinicians in primary care and patients in a way that is useful, meaningful, and changes medical care.”

Optimum specialises in delivering medical research and services to improve diagnosis, treatment and care of chronic diseases within family care and specialist practices.

In the UK, the company has established one of the largest family medicine databases, called the Optimum Patient Care Research Database (OPCRD) which holds nearly seven million anonymised electronic health records from patients in primary care.

Last month Boehringer announced it would expand access to a digital adherence programme that helps COPD patients take their medicines as prescribed by offering them educational and motivational tools.

A collaboration with HealthPrize, RespiPoints is a free mobile and web-based programme that’s open to patients in the US who take one of three Boehringer medicines for COPD – Stiolto Respimat, Spiriva Respimat or Spiriva Handihaler.