Increase Cost of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Reducing The Cost of COPD Treatment
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Reducing The Cost of COPD Treatment
Proposed Solution
The solution proposed is based on reducing the medical cost of COPD. The solution is the improvement of COPD health care management. As suggested by the COPD Foundation (2014), the skyrocketing cost of COPD treatment globally is due to hospitalizations due to readmissions and complication. The key problem is preventable through an enactment of better COPD management to curb readmissions and associated complications (COPD Foundation, 2014). Enhancing management of COPD, like any other chronic disease, decreases the cost and improves the effectiveness of service delivery. The proposal revolves around the notion that better COPD care has the potential to decrease avoidable costs, results in patients feeling better and consequently reduces readmissions cases that WHO estimated to contribute to 49% of COPD treatment expenditure in the US (WHO, 2014). The choice of decreasing cost through enhancing COPD management is after the analysis of the COPD Foundation statistics that despite COPD being the third causal agent of death in the US, it receives less attention from health care practitioners.
Implementation Plan
Current Situation
COPD is ranked among the leading chronic diseases responsible for prevalent mortality and morbidity in the health care arena. COPD has imposed a financial and economic burden to health facilities due to the cost of readmission. In the year 2013, CDC ranked COPD as the third leading cause of mortality in the US, with an approximated direct and indirect cost of attending it being $50 billion (Mapel & Schum, 2010). Out of the total costs, the cost of patient readmissions constitutes 45% of the budget, while the rest is shared by related complication and first-time treatment. The treatment and diagnosis of victims affected by COPD in the US and globally continue to pose a burden, challenges, and problems that threatens the health care delivery systems (Mannino & Homa, 2012). The problem results from the lack of coordinated and integrated patient management model with a well-noted absence of effective follow-up care between different levels of COPD care. The rates of readmission can be reduced through having a home-based COPD management model that is based on telehealth to reduce the chances of patients returning for checks, which contributes to congestion. According to CDC, 75% percent of healthcare professional are not ready for the emerging roles of nursing such as telehealth that could be used to manage patients while at their homes (Sullivan, 2014). The acute challenge is also caused by the shortage of medical staff that reduces the quality of COPD services delivered. The proposal is to have a coordinated set of COPD management protocol for ensuring effective delivery of services to reduce the prevalent cases of readmissions.
Proposed Plan
The plan entails the enhancement of the existing COPD management protocol by proposing some amendment and improvement. The plan will be based on four key cornerstones, which includes monitoring and assessment of the disease upon patient arrival to identify the level of the disease and categorize the based on treatment ...