Tonya Winders Talks About What Asthma Care Guidelines Are Currently Lacking

Tonya Winders, MBA, CEO and president of the Allergy & Asthma Network, lists the major current issues with current asthma care guidelines at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) International Congress 2021.

Transcript:

What are some of the challenges that administrators and providers are facing regarding current guidelines to asthma care?

Current asthma guidelines really do outline what is the standard of care, the best optimal care, that a patient should come to expect or have delivered across the world. Unfortunately, many health care systems simply are not equipped and so, whether it be on the front end of prevention or the early diagnosis of those chronic respiratory conditions, there just simply isn't enough trained medical providers to provide that. There's also not enough recognition or awareness of the disease symptoms to drive patients to the right area of medicine to actually get the appropriate diagnosis.

And then when we talk about treatment even after the diagnosis is made, getting the right treatment to the right patient at the right time with the fewest barriers is consistently challenging for patients. And there are many different reasons for that, again, whether they're in primary care or subspecialty care. Whether it is access barriers to more innovative personalized treatments, due to out-of-pocket costs or step therapy policies. I mean, there are many different reasons why governments and health insurance providers limit access to different innovative treatments.