Adopting a stratified approach to asthma

The Academy and NHS England have today published the report of the FORUM meeting on ‘Adoption of a stratified approach to asthma’.

Stratified medicine offers a wealth of opportunities for patients and the healthcare sector, potentially enabling patients to benefit from more targeted treatments while delivering greater efficiencies across the healthcare system. Severe asthma affects a quarter of a million people in the UK, who find that they do not respond to traditional first-line asthma treatments. Recent research has shown that severe asthma can be stratified based on various factors such as patient adherence and biomarkers, which could allow for the personalisation of care pathways for severe asthma patients for the better selection of disease management strategies and treatments.

The meeting report provides a summary of discussions held at the FORUM roundtable on ‘Exemplar clinical pathways for a stratified approach to asthma’, held jointly with NHS England on 20 March 2017. The workshop forms part of the Academy’s workstream around stratified medicine and will feed into NHS England’s Personalised Medicine Strategy. It was held as part of a series of meetings, with previous roundtables focused on diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  Over the course of the afternoon, participants discussed pathways for the stratification of severe asthma in the NHS, the challenges to implementation and ways forward. Key themes emerging from the meeting included: 

• The existing opportunities for improving patient adherence to treatment, and stratifying patients based on assessment of adherence.
• The importance of patient and clinician engagement to improve adherence and understanding of stratified treatment interventions, through empowering the patient to be invested in their care decisions.
• The need to establish a robust evidence base for the implementation of stratified care pathways including a systematic approach to data collection.
• The scope for building capacity and capability to drive adoption of a stratified approach across the NHS, and ensuring scalability of stratified pathways and the associated technologies.
• Better streamlining and integration of care pathways and referral routes to ensure that there are adequate entry and escalation points for severe asthma patients.

To download the meeting report please use the link to the right of the page. To find out more about the event, please visit the FORUM events page.

 Academy of Medical Sciences' FORUM

The Academy of Medical Sciences’ FORUM was established in 2003 to catalyse connections across industry, academia, the NHS and the wider healthcare sector. Since then, a range of FORUM activities and events have brought together researchers, research funders and research users from across academia, industry, NHS, Government, and the charity, healthcare and regulatory sectors. Further information and details of future events can be found on the FORUM homepage.