In today's overburdened healthcare system, office visits are often brief, and the face-to-face encounter between physicians and patients is short. In asthma, in particular, disease severity is sometimes under appreciated by both patients and providers, so that hospitalization is the first indication that the patient is seriously afflicted. By assisting primary care physicians to assess the progression of symptoms and monitor peak flow, electronic technology can help reduce the need for costly tertiary care. Pharmacon has created an integrated system that linked its proprietary, patent pending, Internet-based system-Health-e-Partner (R)-with other existing, readily available, interactive voice response (IVR) technologies (cellular phones, pagers, and e-mail) to facilitate communication between healthcare providers and asthma patients. The Health-e-Partner(R) system reduces the physician's time commitments and provides patients with a valuable educational service that can empower the patient regarding his or her own medical care. This system is designed to improve asthma health outcomes in the population at large, and reduce healthcare costs stemming from asthma. Recently, the company successfully deployed Health-e-Partner(R) in ProHealth Physicians (PHP) facilities throughout Connecticut to test the feasibility of having practice management facilitated through the use of automated asthma clinical practice guidelines based on the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA). Phase I of the proposed study will test this concept, one that has been well-researched and validated in an educated, highly-motivated population, in an urban, underserved population of asthmatics in one member (Queens Hospital Center) of the not-for-profit New York Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC)-a large, inner-city hospital system. Phase II will aim to extend deployment of Health-e-Partner to integrate with HHC's electronic medical record and beyond the pilot HHC group to other groups within the HHC network. Based on the feedback Pharmacon obtains from participants in Phases I and II, the system will be further refined and will be deployed on a large-scale basis to cover diverse geographic regions and serve as a common platform for further development and deployment of similar systems in other chronic disease areas. Currently, there are no such systems and we believe that this would be a vital service to the community and a natural precursor to the commercialization of our work.
