Concerned about the growing incidence of COPD, members of the Congressional COPD Caucus urged NIH and CDC www.cdc.gov to craft a comprehensive federal plan to tackle the disease. As a result NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) www.nhlbi.nih.gov collaborated with CDC and other partners to produce the “COPD National Action Plan” www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/education/copd .
The COPD plan includes five goals. The goals are (1) empower people with COPD, (2) improve the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of COPD, (3) collect, analyze, report, and disseminate COPD-related public health data, (4) increase and sustain research, and (5) translate national policy, educational, and program recommendations into research and public healthcare actions.
Goal (3) makes it clear that reliable data is critical for informed decision-making. Health data can help measure the prevalence and characteristics of COPD, patterns of treatment, and patient outcomes to form the basis for effective prevention and diagnosis of COPD as well as for the treatment of people at risk for or living with the disease.
The adoption of secure health IT, the use of EHRs and PHRs and the creation of large-scale patient registries, can help capture and collect patient-level data. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) part of CDC www.cdc.gov/nchs, collects data through surveys.
The surveys represent a good source for population surveillance data. Other data is collected from Census Bureau surveys, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and NCHS provider surveys.
The surveys can also reveal trends that spur new policies, resource allocations, or budget modifications, and may find new ways to assess COPD prevalence and help people in the field to do more productive predictive modeling.
A biannual report should be prepared to include COPD prevalence, mortality, related health indicators, and care delivery measurements. Effort should be to conduct studies to assess all the new models of detection, care, and treatment for people living with COPD including studies addressing barriers to care and rehabilitation services. Finally, federal and non-federal partners should be encouraged to publish outcomes of COPD data analyses.