The California HealthCare Foundation has made a second investment in Asthmapolis, the Wisconsin-based developer of an mHealth platform designed to help people with asthma and COPD manage their health.
"Knowledge is power, and Asthmapolis empowers people with asthma or COPD and their medical team to harness knowledge for better self-care and treatment," said Margaret Laws, director of the CHCF Innovations for the Underserved program, which manages the CHCF Health Innovation Fund, in a press release. "We are pleased that Asthmapolis has developed a low-cost solution that can provide patients with education through email, text, mobile apps and personalized outreach by certified asthma educators."
"We believe there is tremendous potential for patients to benefit from technology that empowers them to better understand and manage chronic conditions," said Laws, whose organization backed Asthmapolis in its launch and has invested $1.047 million to date.
"We need patients to tell us about the severity of their symptoms, how often they have sudden attacks, and what triggers their attacks so we can modify their treatment plans accordingly," added Rajan Merchant, an allergy, asthma and clinical immunology specialist at Dignity Health, in the release. "With the Asthmapolis sensor and software application the patient's inhaler becomes a diary — recording, analyzing, and reporting data in real time — which helps providers monitor their patients and helps patients practice informed self-management."
Launched in 2010 and based in Madison, Wis., Asthmapolis has developed a platform that uses smartphone apps and snap-on inhaler sensors that can track when and how often people use inhalers. Asthmapolis then pushes personalized information to both the patient and the physician, providing information on medication use as well as feedback. The sensor acts as a kind of asthma diary, capturing medication use and other data and storing it in the user's smartphone, which can then be shared with the physician to create a better management plan.
The platform received FDA clearance in 2012.
"We look forward to working with CHCF on our joint mission to bring better health to communities across California," said David Van Sickle, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Asthmapolis, in the release. "With effort and enthusiasm we are together turning the corner on respiratory disease among these populations and closing the gaps in asthma care that have raised costs and led to millions of days of preventable suffering."
In an interview earlier this year, Van Sickle and Mark Gehring, the company's president and co-founder, pointed out that asthma affects roughly 25 million people in the United States, or about 8.4 percent of the population. More importantly, they said, about 60 percent of those people aren't managing their disease properly, and 80 percent think they are.
Van Sickle said asthma sufferers often learn to accommodate their symptoms, rather than find ways to better manage their asthma – which in turn would lead to less symptoms and a reduction in the $3,000 to $4,000 spent by each patient each year to try to control their asthma. Uncontrolled asthma, he added, leads to some 500,000 hospitalizations, 2 million emergency department visits, 10 million physician visits and 25 million missed days of school or work per year.
“Asthma alone is a $50 billion problem in the United States. We look forward to accelerating our commercial efforts to improve asthma control and produce sizable economic savings,” he said in an April 4 press release announcing the new funding.
Added Gehring: “To date we’ve helped our users achieve an extra 20,000 asthma-free days. Each day they feel better is also a day they don’t end up in the emergency department, which means reduced costs for our payer and health system customers.”
