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P35 Service evaluation of CPAP monitoring to assess quality of care for obstructive sleep apnoea patients without CPAP modems

bmjresp · 2025-09-16 · canonical JSON source

8 visible annotations · policy: published · automated confidence ≥ 75.00%

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Introduction Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy is the gold standard treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea. To ensure patients are treated effectively, CPAP users are monitored and regarded as compliant when using the device ≥70% of days ≥4 hours/day. Modem devices can be installed to transmit CPAP clinical data to hospitals to facilitate remote monitoring. During the COVID-19 outbreak, University Hospitals of North Midlands (UHNM) changed clinical reviews from face-to-face to telephone, resulting in long-term patients without modems having to report their usage with limited data. We wanted to evaluate whether CPAP users without modems between May 2020 and May 2022 would have been given different clinical outcomes or follow-up plans if they had a modem installed.Method Data was collected retrospectively from UHNM’s EncoreAnywhere database. 154 patients were recruited who completed a telephone review between May 2020 and May 2022, did not own a modem during this period, and were provided with a modem after June 2022 as part of UHNM’s CPAP Swap Scheme. Descriptive methods, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Kendall’s tau-b were used to measure the reliability of patient-reported data compared to modem-integrated data.Results 70% of patients used their CPAP ≥70% of days ≥4 hours. There was not a significant agreement between patient-reported 30-day and modem-integrated 180-day usage (≥70% compliance, ≥4 hrs daily usage. N=73, ICC = 25%; p = 0.11). Modem-integrated data revealed 179 CPAP therapy issues in 50% of patients that were undetectable from the patient-reported data at the time. Modem-integrated data revealed 45.5% of patients would have needed changes to their treatment ( figure 1). 24% of patients needed a 3-month follow-up instead of a 12- or 24-month follow-up.Abstract P35 Figure 1Percentages of CPAP issues that were not detected by clinicians or patients from the subjective data obtained during telephone reviews. Number of responses = 179. Clockwise: No Issues (89); High Leak (26); Moderate Leak (16); Hitting Cap (16); Poor Duration (9); Poor Usage (8); Mild AHI (5); Severe AHI (5); Other (5)Conclusion The objective data from modems can reveal significant therapy problems that were not detected from patient-reported data alone. For this reason, our results support the use of modems for long-term patients. However, the feasibility of effectively resolving all therapy issues with the sleep department’s limitations during the COVID-19 outbreak had they been discovered at the time is debatable.