Air Care

As health care costs escalate, medical and technology providers are pooling resources to create affordable, cutting-edge solutions for patients recovering in their homes. A prime example is a joint venture involving QRS Diagnostic, Terry Respiratory, Respironics and Houston's Texas Children's Hospital to provide quality support for pediatric lung-transplant patients.

TCH serves young lung-transplant patients from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and other states in the region. The ability to send those children home with accurate post-operative care, no matter where they live, and to monitor them directly — yet remotely, via a direct hook-up to the hospital's pulmonary function lab — is proving to be an important part of successful recuperation.

The story begins with George B. Mallory, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the lung-transplant program at TCH. Before coming to Houston, Mallory had developed the transplant program at St. Louis Children's Hospital, where he was responsible for 130 pediatric lung-transplant patients. After surgery, those patients were sent home with a conventional spirometer for testing the volume and velocity of airflow from their transplanted lungs.

“Decreased pulmonary function is an early, and critical, indicator of possible transplant rejection, and careful, detailed, ongoing surveillance of lung health is one of the keys to a good outcome,” Mallory says.

“We did not have a direct automated way to get the actual numbers and monitor flow-volume curves remotely, so we asked families to send us written logs of the test results,” he continues. “One of our disappointments in St. Louis was poor adherence to our requests for daily spirometry after we sent our patients home.”

Determined to find a better way in Houston, Mallory contacted Houston-based Terry Respiratory, a provider of high-end, home respiratory services for infants and children, and asked for help.

“From the start, Dr. Mallory and I understood the essential attributes of an ideal solution,” says Terry Hull, CRT, RCP, and Terry Respiratory's director of operations. “We had to have an accurate spirometer that would be convenient and easy for kids and their families to use at home. And, it had to support real-time [applications] and remote access to the test results so TCH could monitor patients' lung function at any time, no matter how far from Houston they lived.”