New resources for COPD professionals: outlining the COPD care pathway and the core values guiding remote monitoring
Two new resources have been launched from the LUMC/NELL Breath-Sense researchers!
Atena Mahboubian, Jiska Aardoom, Marise Kasteleyn, and colleagues offer a practical way to explore how to make COPD care better suited to patients and their daily lives through a visual COPD care pathway “Metro Map” and a website collecting values and requirements for remote patient monitoring (RPM).
But why was this necessary? COPD care is rarely a single, straightforward journey. Patients may move between primary and secondary care, experience periods of stability and exacerbation, receive rehabilitation, adjust medication, and increasingly interact with healthcare professionals remotely.
Understanding how all these pieces fit together is essential when developing new technologies for COPD care. This is why our researchers at LUMC/NeLL worked hard to develop new tools and facilitate the COPD journey.
A Metro Map for the COPD care pathway
The Metro Map: COPD care process map is a visual journey planner that maps out the entire COPD care pathway, illustrating the critical interactions between primary and secondary healthcare. Developed based on scientific literature, guidelines, and direct interviews with patients and healthcare professionals, this "metro line" framework tracks a patient’s journey from initial signs and diagnostics through treatment options, follow-up care, and remote patient monitoring (RPM).
By mapping these stages alongside real-world patient experiences, barriers, and touchpoints for innovative tools like a breath analysis device, the map serves as a practical blueprint for designing more integrated, low-burden chronic care pathways. The touchpoints show possible interactions with such tools and how they can support decisions such as early diagnosis, medication adjustments, managing home-based flare-ups, and enriching remote monitoring.
Rather than presenting technology as a replacement for existing care, the Metro Map helps us ask a more useful question: Where could a new tool genuinely add value within the existing COPD care pathway?
From the users to the makers: A practical tool for product development
The Metro Map is complemented by a new online resource: Developing innovations – Values & Requirements.
This website brings together the values and requirements identified through a co-creation research process involving patients, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders, including IT specialists, innovation managers, and health insurers. It is intended as a practical tool for scientists, designers, innovators and other professionals developing innovations and remote patient monitoring products or processes, particularly in pulmonary healthcare.
The website focuses on what a new technology should achieve and how it should fit into people's lives and healthcare systems. To be truly useful, the requirements go into practical detail. For example, they address the importance of making monitoring easy to use and low-burden for patients, ensuring that healthcare professionals can access and interpret relevant information, establishing clear responsibilities between different healthcare providers, and ensuring that technology is reliable and secure.
The identified values cover multiple areas, including:
Patient-centred care and improved patient outcomes
User-friendliness and inclusivity
Clear agreements on RPM responsibilities
Patient empowerment
Information provision and guidance
Optimising care delivery
Comprehensive implementation
Healthcare professionals' care provision
Safety and reliability
Two resources, one goal
The two resources complement each other: The Metro Map illustrates where activities occur in the COPD care journey, and the Values & Requirements website discusses what matters when designing and implementing innovations within that journey.
Together, they offer a valuable framework for thinking beyond just technology. An effective remote monitoring solution must integrate smoothly into clinical workflows, support patients, clarify roles, and lead to meaningful care improvements.
This approach is especially relevant for Breath-Sense, as breath analysis can reveal new health information. However, its true value depends on how that information is used, by whom, and at what stage in the care process. The Metro Map highlights these opportunities, while the values and requirements guide the development of solutions that meet the needs of both patients and healthcare professionals.
Written by L. Verga
Reviewed by A. Mahboubian
