personalized health coaching tips. MyAir takes the same data sent to the home medical equipment provider and puts it into a different user interface that is more patient-friendly, Hollingshead said. It includes a score for the duration of a patient’s sleep, and can tell the patient if their CPAP mask is leaking.
“It empowers patients to manage their own care, and patients who are managing their own therapy in myAir are more adherent,” Hollingshead said. “The compliance rate is 87 percent.”
With the system collecting data from over 2 million patients every night, Hollingshead said ResMed has accumulated data from more than 1 billion “patient nights.”
“The next step is to take that data and work with payers and hospital systems to do more work on chronic diseases like diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” he said. According to ResMed, studies have shown that sleep-disordered breathing also is closely associated with such cardiovascular diseases as drug-resistant hypertension, obesity, and congestive heart failure.
It’s an opportunity that has gone largely untapped. In its 2016 annual report, ResMed says a long-term epidemiology study published in 2013 estimated that 26 percent of adults between the ages of 30 and 70 have some form of obstructive sleep apnea. In the United States, that works out to about 46 million people.
As for today’s introduction of the AirMini, Hollingshead said, “What we’re trying to do with the mini is make CPAP therapy way easier for patients.” The many millions of people who are on CPAP typically take four to five trips each year, and over half of them don’t take their CPAP device with them.
Hollingshead said ResMed is targeting customers who already have a bedside CPAP device, offering them a second device for travel. An AirMini smartphone app (for Apple iOS and Android) enables patients to adjust the AirMini and track their own usage data.
“We just want people to travel with their therapy in a way that’s not cumbersome,” Hollingshead said. “We have high hopes. Right now the market for a second CPAP device is small, but it isn’t because there is no demand.”
