March 12, 2024
2 min read
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Key takeaways:
- A more personalized approach to care for respiratory diseases could help determine when it is safe to return to work or school.
- A new survey and updated app could also help inform decisions.
Personalized care could help patients and providers plan safe returns to work or school from respiratory illnesses, according to a research review.
Barbara A. Rath, MD, PhD, founder of nonprofit Vaccine Safety Initiative, delivered the review as part of the pre-conference activities for the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.
Rath focused on a future of more personalized care for respiratory diseases such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus in which patients and doctors work closer to be able to more accurately determine when the infectious part of a patient’s illness has passed, and when it is safe for them to return to work — or for children to return to school.
“How long are these symptoms going to continue? How is this going to affect sleep, family life, plans for the next days? Do we have to stay away from kindergarten, school or work?” Rath said, explaining to Healio some of the questions that need to be answered to make these decisions.
Rath’s organization helped develop an online symptom survey where patients can give providers their views on symptoms, improvement and recovery. The anonymous survey is available in 20 languages and takes around 20 minutes to complete.
Early results indicate that patients prioritize symptoms that are out of control and need professional help and are less concerned about cold-like symptoms, although they may see common symptoms like cough as being more important when present in a child or older adult.
Symptoms that they see as being the most disruptive — for example, headache, vomiting, diarrhea and fever — are ones they would like to see prevented by a vaccine. With less disruptive symptoms, they prefer medications.
They have launched several versions of a mobile app called VIVI ScoreApp, which patients and providers can use to score the severity of a patient’s illness. Over time, the group believes the app could help patients and providers develop a precision medicine approach to care that centers a patient’s preferences.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, patients have also grown more accustomed to using home tests for respiratory illnesses. Such tests, when used along with precise clinical assessments, could help tailor treatments to patient experiences, Rath said.
“Transparent, shared decision-making keeps the patient on board — and can be particularly helpful for respiratory viral infections that have become treatable and/or preventable through vaccination, such as influenza, COVID-19 and RSV,” Rath said in a press release.
Using sensitive rapid tests, apps, next generation sequencing and biomarker assays, and other tools at the point of care can practically help to personalize treatments, Rath said.
She said future research may benefit from greater integration of user-friendly digital tools into routine medical care.
“In the future, we will likely see massive changes in the ways flu-like illness and respiratory viral infections are managed,” Rath said. “The best change is change driven by the initiative of patients themselves, as well as their caregivers, facilitated by effective and affordable rapid diagnostics, treatment options and vaccines. While we introduce new modalities of prevention and management, we will require new consensus guidelines and advanced research into the exact modes of transmission of viral infection between humans and animals.”
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